Explore the nuances of adding a tile hatch to a CAD floor plan. The article breaks down the process, from dealing with bounding geometry to adjusting the scale and positioning of the tile pattern within AutoCAD.
Key Insights
- The article educates about how to add a tile hatch to a floor plan in a CAD model. For this, the floor needs to be bounded and understood by the AutoCAD software.
- The process involves creating a new layer for the specific tile pattern, adding bounding geometry, and then inserting the hatch. The layer color can be altered to make it distinct, and the hatch scale can be adjusted to represent the real-world size of the tile.
- The tile placement can be further optimized by setting a specific point as the origin in the hatch editor. This allows for a more precise and visually pleasing tile arrangement, potentially preventing inaccuracies that could lead to issues if sent to a tile cutter.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
In this video, we are going to move away from our CAD 101 floor plan and add a tile hatch, which did not exist in our previous drawing. Let's close our block editor and zoom in on the bathroom.
It doesn't happen all the time, but in some cases, we need to show the floor and how the drawing interacts with the floor plane in our model files. In this case, the bathroom is supposed to have a tile hatch, and this is an interesting problem, because now we need to talk about how the floor is bounded. What do I mean by bounded? Well, if I try to start a hatch, and I'll do this on layer zero for the example.
I'll go to the hatch, and I'll choose solid just for the example, pick points. I'll add this white hatch into here, but as soon as I try to pick my doorframe, it's not going to work. This is because there's no bounding line here, meaning how does the AutoCAD software understand that this is my bathroom? It doesn't.
We know that there's a header above that door, but there's no line showing that geometry. Remember, AutoCAD does not understand the difference between these objects. Only we assign a visual association with them and add names to our layers.
In this case, we need to add a new layer for our A pattern bath, and then we need to add in some bounding geometry. Let's do that first. I'll go to layer properties.
Learn AutoCAD
- Nationally accredited
- Create your own portfolio
- Free student software
- Learn at your convenience
- Authorized Autodesk training center
With layer zero selected, I'll go to new layer, and this is going to be our A dash pat dash bath. This could also be named A dash pat slash tile, but in this case, I'll name it bath, and that's just in case the bathroom floor pattern is changed to something else. Now that my layer is created, let's change the color to something unique.
In this case, I will choose color 121, and I'll hit okay, and I will make it my current layer. I'll close my window, and now we need to add in our hatch, but first, let's bound the room. Where would the tile actually end? In this case, I would expect that it would end right underneath the door, so it's pretty simple.
I'll add a line from the hinge of the door across to here. Enter to say that I'm done. You'll notice that this line just barely overlaps our door.
Because the door would be on top of that line, as this line is on the floor, I can select the line, right click, draw order, send to back. Now let's try to add our tile hatch. With my A pat bath layer still active, I'll go to hatch, and in this case, I want to make a square pattern that represents a tile.
If I open my hatch patterns dropdown, I can see that there are a lot of hatches built into AutoCAD. These represent many different objects. In this case, I want to find the net pattern.
Also, I want to update the scale to a scale factor of 48. This will make it look like a six-inch tile in our drawing. So I will choose in this space, and I will choose in my doorway as well.
Now that I have that bounding line, it has sealed off where my hatch needs to be added. I'll hit ENTER to lock it in, and you'll notice a couple of things right away. First, the hatch does not go into our fixtures, into our door symbol, and into our text.
There's a slight outline, which is created by our emtext. This is very helpful to make visually obvious what we're looking at. Now, if I pick on my hatch, I can see that it is a little off.
If I sent this to a tile cutter, he'd be absolutely furious. He would want to start with a full tile in one corner and then work away from there. We can actually change the way our tile looks by choosing the set origin option in our hatch editor.
So with our hatch selected, I'll hit set origin, and I'll pick this endpoint here to start my hatch. Now the tile fits much better into the space, and when I go zoom extents, control s to save, we have a nice floor plan. To finish the floor plan, let's add our dimensions.
But first, I'll jump over to CAD 201A201 and hit my link to update my reference. We can compare the changes and see that we've added annotation objects and a line. Let me hit the check mark.
You can see that the bath tile has also been added. I'll jump back to plan model, control s to save, and I'll see you in the next video.
