Is Hatching Broken or am I missing something?

[WhistlerBuilder]

I have a project where the marketing team is requesting a plan set where I have all the walls displaying in solid black. This is a fairly commonly requested feature, but my standard practice is to have the wall layers with different hatching and textures so its clear on technical drawings what the different materials are. This creates a problem when the hatching tool in Chief cannot completely fill wall intersections, and does not appear to have a system where I can correct the tools automatic mistakes. (See attached wall juncture issue).

 

Short of going through the plan, and changing every single material fill option in every single wall type to black, thereby screwing up all my details and technical drawings... What are my options for achieving the solid black marketing drawing request?

[BryceEngstrom]

Doesn't seem like it would take that long to just do a Save As plan, just for this request, and just change all the walls to one layer walls with a black fill?

 

I don't get those little white triangles at the wall intersections when I turn all the layers in this multi-layer wall to solid black fills.

[WhistlerBuilder]

@BryceEngstrom
A "Save as" solution is a work around that could happen. It becomes less effective the more wall types you have, and the more layers each type has.

 

The triangles form with the hatching tool. Changing the wall layers to solid black fill does not generate the same problem. Which is why the title of my post is in reference to the hatching tool being broken.

 

I would really like to use the hatching tool, because it is actually designed to do what I am trying to do, it just seems to have a glitch on wall junctions.

[DBCooper]

I don't think the wall hatch likes that 3 wall intersection with different width walls.  Not sure if there is a way to fix it using the "edit wall layer intersections" tool.  You could always just create a filled polyline to hide it but you might have to edit it every time you make a change to the wall intersection.  You can put it on the same layer as the wall hatch so that you can turn it on/off with them. 

 

[WhistlerBuilder]

15 minutes ago, DBCooper said:

I don't think the wall hatch likes that 3 wall intersection with different width walls.  Not sure if there is a way to fix it using the "edit wall layer intersections" tool.  You could always just create a filled polyline to hide it but you might have to edit it every time you make a change to the wall intersection.  You can put it on the same layer as the wall hatch so that you can turn it on/off with them. 

 

The problem with adding a filled polyline to hide the glitches is... there are A LOT of glitches. I just showed one example of an intersection. The plans have dozens per floor rendering the hatching tool completely useless for this application as it requires so much correcting that you might as well just do a filled polyline over the walls as a separate layer instead of using the hatching tool at all.

I tried the wall intersection tool. It does not effect the hatching tool. There appears to be no way to manually correct the hatching tools failures inside the tool.

[Richard_Morrison]

2 hours ago, WhistlerBuilder said:

I would really like to use the hatching tool, because it is actually designed to do what I am trying to do, it just seems to have a glitch on wall junctions.

The hatching tool has been broken at intersections for many versions. It has been reported many times, and I always think that maybe THIS will be the version that corrects it. Yeah, maybe X16.

[WhistlerBuilder]

1 hour ago, Richard_Morrison said:

The hatching tool has been broken at intersections for many versions. It has been reported many times, and I always think that maybe THIS will be the version that corrects it. Yeah, maybe X16.

Thank you for confirming that it is in fact broken. I was hoping that I was wrong and just missing some tip or trick to make it work. How unfortunate!

[glennw]

Can you post a simple plan that demonstrates this.

I have tried many ways but cannot reproduce the problem.

[WhistlerBuilder]

4 hours ago, glennw said:

Can you post a simple plan that demonstrates this.

I have tried many ways but cannot reproduce the problem.

See attached.

 

Copy paste a portion of the plan showing multiple fails.

Hatching Fail.plan

[robdyck]

22 hours ago, WhistlerBuilder said:

What are my options for achieving the solid black marketing drawing request?

There's nothing fun about this but I'd probably consider making a CAD detail out of those wall hatches. The cleanup is pretty quick, although not live.  

[JiAngelo]

Alternatively, you can make a layer called "Walls, Hatching 2" for example, then created a filled-by-layer CAD box and change it to reside on that layer.  Then paste those boxes resized over the individual gaps.  Turn off both layers to see your normal plan, turn on both layers to see Marketing plan.  I'm showing the layer in red first, then black, then hatching off, walls on.  

 

 

 

 

[WhistlerBuilder]

10 minutes ago, JiAngelo said:

Alternatively, you can make a layer called "Walls, Hatching 2" for example, then created a filled-by-layer CAD box and change it to reside on that layer.  Then paste those boxes resized over the individual gaps.  Turn off both layers to see your normal plan, turn on both layers to see Marketing plan.  I'm showing the layer in red first, then black, then hatching off, walls on.  

 

 

 

 

Thank you for looking into this.
Quick question on your solution. Did you try "printing to pdf" with this? Do the cad overlay for hatching show up as outlined boxes or visible elements? Chief seems to have a very difficult time with shading solid shapes. It fills solid shapes with thousands of lines, and often leaves visible artifacts in what are supposed to be solid shapes. I made the assumption that doing a cad overlay of the hatching would leave visible blocks where I tried to fill the hatching tools errors.

[JiAngelo]

Printed fine for me.  I've attached your plan so that you can try it out.

 

Create a view with normal walls locked makes it easier to maneuver and place the cad boxes.  (otherwise you have to cycle through Chief selecting wall elements first every time you want to grab a side of a box and stretch it to cover the gaps.

 

 

1553193773_HatchingFail.plan Test Hatch Walls.pdf