Take a Ride on the Hatch Express With SuperHatch: Tuesday Tips With Frank

[The AutoCAD Blog]

By my count, AutoCAD comes with 82 hatch patterns. A list that large will surely contain everything you need, right? Of course not. That’s where SuperHatch can come to the rescue.

SuperHatch is an AutoLISP command, and can be found in the Draw panel of the Express Tools tab of the ribbon. It seems like it’s been there forever, but it has a copyright date of 1999 in the .LSP file, so we’ll go with that. SuperHatch allows you to use an image, block, Xref, or wipeout as a hatch pattern. Or, if one of those objects already exists in your drawing, you can simply select it. Let’s look at a couple of ways to use this Express Tool to your advantage.

Apply Material Images

Let’s say you have a 2D detail that’s just lines and polylines. The boss comes to you and tells you they need to use it for the marketing team, and tells you to “add a little pop with some realistic looking materials”? Oh, and they need it for a meeting in half an hour.

Now what? You scroll through the gallery of hatches, and of course, nothing there comes close. You need a hatch pattern for wood, concrete, and dirt. There’s probably something in the Materials collection over in the 3D world, but that’s not a good option either. Then you remember that blog post you read about SuperHatch.

Remember? You can apply images as hatches. Being a resourceful internet search engine user, you quickly find some great images and download them (or screengrab and save as an image). Now you at least have your images and you have about 20 minutes left. No problem. Let’s look at that workflow.

I’ve inserted my three images in the image below using the Xref palette. A word of warning… if you did use a screencap method to grab your image, and are thinking of just popping it in, make sure you use “Paste Special” and add it as an “Image Entity”. Otherwise, you’ll get an OLE object and SuperHatch won’t know what to do with it.

Since I’ve already added the images, I’ll call up SuperHatch and use the “Select existing <” button. I’ll select the wood grain image, then with the default option of “Internal Point”, I’ll click inside one of the upright rectangles, and then the other. Now that my internal picking is done, I’ll press Enter, and the wood grain hatch is created!

Do the same workflow for the other two necessary images, filling in the footings and the surrounding dirt, and you’ve just made the boss happy with 15 minutes to spare. Go ahead and give yourself a pat on the back while you’re getting a well-deserved cup of coffee.

Create Your Own Hatch-looking Hatch

The file that contains the hatch pattern definitions is named acad.pat. If you find it and open it, you’ll see that it’s a simple text file containing a bunch of cryptic definitions. Scroll to the bottom to see a section designated for user-defined patterns. I bet yours is empty too. Nobody in their right mind is going to try their hand at creating a complicated hatch pattern. Check out the image below. These are the definitions for Hexagon and Honeycomb. Both are somewhat complicated, but not terrible. Unless you try to code it.

But, you need what you need, and that’s a complex custom hatch pattern – or at least something that looks like a hatch pattern. SuperHatch to the rescue again.

Check out the animation below. I’ve created a drawing that I want to use as a “tile” in my hatch design. This time, it’s sitting out in a folder, so I choose the “Block” option in the SuperHatch dialog, (yes, fellow Lispers – it’s a DCL file), navigate to my drawing, pop an instance of it into blank space, accept the insert defaults, and another return to end its selection. Now it works like our first example, where I select an interior point and again press return.

And, just like that, I’ve created a hatch-looking hatch! Pretty slick, I’d say.

One more thing… You can select the new faux hatch, but like I said, it’s not a real hatch object. It’s an unnamed Group. If you turn off Group Selection, you can select the individual blocks that make up the group. That control is found in the Home tab of the ribbon, within the Groups panel.

A Final Thought

Are there some nuances to using SuperHatch? Yes. You can’t adjust anything after you’re done. In my previous example, the block used was the same size as the one I chose. If I wanted it bigger, I would have had to scale it during insertion. With the materials images, size also matters. If you put them into the drawing like I did, you might want to make them big; otherwise, they too will want to tile and mess up your fake materials.

But, if the situation calls for it, or even if it’s the boss, SuperHatch really can become your superhero. (Cape and mask not included.)

More Tuesday Tips

Check out our whole Tuesday Tips series for ideas on how to make AutoCAD work for you. 

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