amyb54•13d ago

Tried that 'layered hatch' trick on a complex section cut and it turned into a total mess

I was working on a commercial building detail last week (lots of insulation and weird angles) and thought I'd get fancy with layered hatching to show different materials. Spent 2 hours setting it up perfectly in AutoCAD. Printed it out and the hatch patterns overlapped so bad it looked like a kid drew on it with a Sharpie. The plot style was fine on screen but the lineweights on paper just killed it. Learned the hard way that simple solid fills work better for those tight spaces. Anyone else have a hatch fail story that cost them a whole afternoon?

2 comments

2 Comments

lisa_ross1613d ago

Whew hold up @matthewgonzalez I gotta push back here because I just had a total nightmare with this exact thing on a commercial job last month. I had concrete hatch on top of insulation hatch with a gypsum pattern in between and the scale was perfect on screen but when I printed it on the bond paper all the tiny lines just turned into one big gray blob. Spent three hours redoing it before I just switched to solid fills for the tight corners and it looked 10 times cleaner. You can have all the perfect settings in the world but paper and printer calibration will still mess you up in the weirdest spots.

matthewgonzalez13d ago

Hard disagree here. You probably just didn't zoom in far enough when you set up the scale. Layered hatching is the WHOLE point of doing a proper section cut if you ask me. I run different hatches for concrete, insulation, and gypsum all the time and they look GREAT on paper as long as you keep the scale tight and match your plot style to the actual paper finish. The key is making sure your lineweights are set to something like 0.18mm for the finer hatches or those tiny spaces WILL bleed together. Sounds like a setup problem not a method problem.