Creating Wall and Masonry Hatches in AutoCAD with Layer Isolation and Accurate Hatch Placement

In this video, we are going to work on the two wall hatches, the hatch on the A pattern layer that goes inside of our A wall geometry, and the hatch that goes in our A wall masonry layer that represents the brick. To begin, let's start with our A wall hatch.

For this workflow, I want to isolate the A wall layer so that we can see only the geometry we need inside of the A wall bounding boxes. So, I'm going to go select one of the yellow lines, and then I'm going to type in L-A-Y-I-S-O, Lay Iso. Now, this is also here as a button, Layer Iso, Isolate, and either by typing it in or clicking the button, when you select your yellow line and hit ENTER, it will only show that layer.

Here we can see all the other layers have been turned off in our layer properties. Now, turn on the A pattern layer and select it to make it your current layer. We've done this before in previous courses.

We're going to place a solid hatch inside of the wall boundings of all of these objects. So, I'm going to go to hatch, I'm going to pick solid, and if these were all joined polylines, we could use objects and select all. Unfortunately, these are individual line segments, so we have to use pick points and zoom in and pick on the inside of each one of these bounding shapes.

And you can really see, once you zoom in with only the A wall layer isolated, how crazy these shapes have actually gotten. They're all their own unique way to represent geometry by themselves. And of course, when we see the walls and doors on, we see that it still resembles a floor plan.

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But this is such an interesting shape that can only be created by splitting up our doors and windows. I'm going to do a zoom extents just to double check visually that I've selected all of those bounding areas. It looks like I have, and I will close hatch creation.

Next, as is best practice, I'm going to select my hatch, right click, draw order, send to back. We want that hatch to be below our wall layer's geometry. Next, I'm going to turn on my A wall masonry layer, and now we're going to add in the hatch for the brick.

I'm going to make my A wall masonry layer my current layer as well. We want this hatch on the masonry layer, not on the pattern layer. And I'm going to go back to hatch.

This hatch is the ANSI 31, which is a diagonal stripe hatch. And our scale is going to be a scale factor of 24. There's no specific scale that's required for this type of hatch, specifically masonry, but you want it to be nice and legible from your anticipated plot scale.

24 just works best in this case. I'm going to zoom in at the top left, and here we can see where the brick is and where it isn't supposed to be hatched. We still have our glazing off, so there's no boundary for me to choose here.

This is because while we do see the bricks below, they are the windowsill, not covering the window. This hatch represents cut geometry, just like our pochet, the gray hatch, represents the insides of the walls. You don't cut through the brick because there is no brick in front of the wall.

That line we see is the windowsill underneath. Now with these layers on, you should easily be able to see as we work around the perimeter of the building, all of the locations we need to fill with our masonry hatch. Again, make sure you zoom out so that you can select the bounding shapes while you see the entire shape.

You don't want to miss any of the geometry off the sides or top of the screen like we have here. I'm going to make sure I zoom out and pan so that I see that entire bounding shape and pick inside, zoom out again here. There we go.

And there's my last shape. I'll zoom out, do zoom extents, make sure we've gone all the way around the building. It looks like we have.

I'll close my hatch creation. And once again, I'll pick my hatch, right click, draw order, send to back. Zoom extents, control S to save.

Let's go back to layer properties. And I'm going to select layer zero and all the way down to depth points holding shift. And I'm going to turn all of our layers on.

Now let's do one final check to make sure that we're not missing any geometry. If I look closely at all of my rooms, I can see that we're clearly still missing our fixture geometry, but we have one door missing. It's actually this door right here in front of the furnace.

So let's go to the A door layer and let's draw this door in. Now we could look at the handout to remember this exact distance, but remember when we draw rectangles, we don't have to. I'll go rectangle, specify my hinge point as my first rectangle corner point, D enter for distance.

Remember we can type in a rectangular distance and we can also click to specify. So the first distance for the rectangle is going to be this end point to this end point. Then the second distance, which is the height is 1.5 enter.

And now I can draw it in this bottom left quadrant. Click. Now we can rotate this open.

I'll select the rectangle and go rotate. I'll pick this hinge point here. I'll show my polar 45.

Click. And I'll go center start end arc and choose here. Here, holding control to flip the direction and click.

All right, zoom extents, control S to save. And now we're going to add our interior fixture geometry. That includes our counters, our fixtures, and our tile.

I'm going to go and make a fixture, my current layer. And I'm going to turn off my no plot layer, my pattern layer, and my masonry layer. I don't need to see any of those layers as we continue.

Control S to save. And in the next video, we are going to start bringing in our fixtures. I'll see you there.