Use the wipeout tool and hatch tool in AutoCAD to clean up and enhance elevations, including concealing unwanted lines and creating roof patches. Also, explore how to use various wipeout frame options to effectively manage visibility during modeling and printing.
Key Insights
- The wipeout tool in AutoCAD allows the user to draw a shape that 'wipes out' all geometry behind it, effectively concealing unwanted elements. This tool can be especially useful in creating the appearance of a downspout in front of a light, for example.
- Multiple options are available when using the wipeout frame, such as concealing the frame entirely (option zero), displaying and plotting the frame (option two), or showing the frame without printing it (option one). These options provide flexibility in managing visibility during the modeling process.
- The hatch tool in AutoCAD can be used to enhance visual elements, such as creating a shake pattern on a roof. The tool allows control over scale and color, enabling the creation of distinct hatches for different areas.
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The last couple of things we need to do for the geometry of this elevation is the patches on the roof and the wall, and we also want to clean up this area right here. Let's start by cleaning this up. Now there is a way to do this with some tools we already know.
We could burst this block, and then we could go through and use the trim tool and trim out all the geometry here, because the goal is to make it look like this downspout is in front of this light, and there's no easy way to just remove all these lines while using trim. So let's see if there's another way. The other way to do this is with the tool called wipeout.
So I'm going to type that in wipeout, and you'll see that in the command prompt it says specify first point or polyline. Now the polyline tool makes you think that we should be drawing a polyline, like the crossing polyline, for selection, but what wipeout already is doing is a polyline. So let me click a random shape here, and I'll hit ENTER, and you'll see what the wipeout tool does.
If I had chosen polyline, it would have prompted me to find a closed polyline, like a rectangle, that was already drawn on my screen. What the wipeout is doing is it's generating whatever shape you draw, and then simply creating a wipeout, wiping out all of the geometry behind it, so it looks black, or in this case prints white. Now this is not the right shape we need, but you can understand that if we made it in the shape of the downspout, that we would be able to hide whatever was right behind.
So I'm going to delete that wipeout, and let's talk about how to draw a wipeout. Wipeouts can only be drawn with straight edges, and you'll see down here it looks like we have a curve that's intersected by two of these lines that we need to wipe out. It would be really great if we could draw a polyline that had this curve in it, but for wipeouts it has to be straight lines.
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What we're going to do when we reach this section is click this endpoint, and then the intersection, the intersection, and the endpoint. We're not getting a perfect curve, but we're following along as much as we need. As long as we hit every intersection, we'll be okay.
So I'm going to get this section in my view on the screen, type wipeout, and I'll start up here. We could use shift right click nearest, but this midpoint is close enough. So I'll go midpoint to endpoint, then like I said, intersection, intersection, endpoint.
Now I'll use nearest here. I just want to use shift right click nearest to get below my light fixture. Come across, shift right click perpendicular, and then back up.
Endpoint, I can skip over the midpoint. I'll go straight to this endpoint, and then there's a midpoint up here as well. Click enter to say I'm done.
Now obviously the shape is not going to be the shape we want to see. We have lines at the bottom and at the top, but there's a toggle for a setting in AutoCAD that I want us to understand, which is wipeout frame, wipeout frame, enter, and wipeout frame has three options, zero, one, and two. Zero hides the frame completely.
If I hit zero, enter, it's going to hide the frame both on the screen and in print, and I might want to do this. It might just be kind of jarring to see a wipeout when I'm modeling, and you can see here it's clearly hiding some elements, and I might not understand that it's a wipeout. Wipeout frame, enter, wipeout option number two shows the frame and plots it.
If the wipeout was a rectangle, and we wanted it to plot as well, like we were using the geometry of the wipeout itself, then we could set it to two. That wipeout would plot, and you would see it while modeling. But again, this is a drawing setting, so it would have to be applied to all the wipeouts in your drawing, and you'd need to make sure that was the intended case.
In this case, we want wipeout frame option one, enter. This will show the frame, but it will not print, and we'll actually see that when we get to our plot settings. We'll preview this plot in a little bit, and we'll zoom in on this area just to see if it's going to print.
Now, when we went to wipeout frame option zero, we saw that this wipeout was covering up our downspout, and in fact, if I zoom in here, you can see that quite plainly. This arc is not visible because the wipeout is covering it. So what I want to do is grab this light, and I'll grab this light as well, and the wipeout, and right-click, draw order, send to back.
Now the wipeout is behind the downspout geometry, and the two lights are actually all the way back. This helps so we can see the yellow line here and here as well, and now when I plot this, and we'll see that in a few videos, that this area is going to print with the downspout appearing to cover the entire light, but we didn't have to explode or trim it out. I'll hit escape, escape.
Before we put the hatch on these walls, one thing I want to do is hide my finished floor lines. These are going to get in the way and break up our areas that we want to hatch, and it can be easy to hide this layer and then bring that layer back later. So let's go ahead and hide the AFFLR layer, and while this is open, let's go to the A pattern layer and make it our current layer.
Before we draw our hatches, one thing that might mess up in this drawing is this block. In order to make sure that the hatch goes around this geometry, I'm going to start by bursting. Burst, enter, and now hopefully the hatch will ignore this area when placing the shake hatch.
So I'm going to go H, enter for hatch, hit my drop down, and find AR shake. I need to reset my angle to zero, and I'm going to set my scale factor back to one. We're going to see what this looks like.
Maybe we'll adjust it in a minute, and the first place I want to place the hatch is just in this top area. I think this scale is a little large. I'm going to drop this down to 0.5, enter, and I'm going to make two distinct hatches.
This one and then these two are going to be a separate hatch. So for now, I'm going to close hatch creation, hit ENTER to go back in, and make my second hatch here and here. Enter to say I'm done.
The reason I did that is I want this hatch to print as a lighter color. When I select the hatch, I'll go back to the home tab, and then over here is the bi-layer color option. This is the standard for almost all the geometry we draw.
