Hatching with void left in centre?

[Anonymous]

In Autocad you can hatch an area and leave a void in the middle ie you can hatch for example between two square shapes one inside the other leaving the inner square empty. But in Archicad I dont seem to be able to do this, I try to hatch the two squares and it fills the inner one as well. Is there any way to do this ie flood fill a hatch just up to the first boundary lines encountered? So it follows that you dont seem to be able to hatch around in a circle (for example a winding path)and have the hatching join up on itself is this correct?

An associated question is that amending hatching in Autocad is pretty simple as you can change each hatched area independantly. But in Archicad it seems that hatches of the same type are all changed via the attributes settings. So if you want one crosshatched area a different scale say from another you have to set up a completely separate attribute pattern for it. Every time you want a different scale hatch you need another attribute pattern set up and named. Is this correct? Seems very clumsy to me.

Nats

[Gerald Hoffman]

If I understand your 1st question yes you can flood the part of the larger box with the magic wand and it will only fill the area up to the boundary of the lines of the smaller box. Same for a circle or round area.

On the 2nd question yes you need to make up fills that are different patterns or scales if you want to use them. Once they are created though you will not have to repeat these every time as you can reuse by saving these in a template file to begin projects. Not quite as handy as being able to scale individual fill pieces separately though.

[Anonymous]

Almost right, Gerald.

If you flood fill (magic wand) a box which has another box (or circle or whatever) within it, the first fill will also fill the internal shape. You then select the first fill and magic wand inside the internal shape. Hole created. Or, with the fill selected, you can just pick ppoints to create a hole if you don't have a boundary to magic wand to.

2nd point: with the new (in 10) distorted fill feature you can effectively (if slightly clumsily) change the scale of fill patterns. Just stretch the fill handles in both directions.

[TomWaltz]

To cut a hole in a fill:
1) draw (or Magic Wand) the overall fill outline
2) select the fill you just drew
3) draw the shape of the hole.

Step 2 is the one most people miss.

After you draw the hole, you can drag it, mirror it, drag copies of it, and use the pet palette to edit its shape.