Valid hatch boundary not found??

[m_ridzon]

Hello! I experience trouble when I go to use the hatch command in my AutoCAD 2002. I will have a closed off area that I want to hatch. I will activate the command and click the "pick point" button. When I go to click in the closed off area, a screen will pop up that says "valid hatch boundary not found." I don't understand why that is because when I reactivate the command 5 minutes later after working elsewhere on the drawing, it will recognize the same closed off area as a valid boundary whereas before it would not. Why is this? I have made no changes to that particular area of the drawing? Why does it sometimes recognize it as a valid boundary and other times, it doesn't?

M Ridzon

[Anonymous]

Is it possible the usc changed during the time?

wrote in message news:5138227@discussion.autodesk.com...
Hello! I experience trouble when I go to use the hatch command in my
AutoCAD 2002. I will have a closed off area that I want to hatch. I will
activate the command and click the "pick point" button. When I go to click
in the closed off area, a screen will pop up that says "valid hatch boundary
not found." I don't understand why that is because when I reactivate the
command 5 minutes later after working elsewhere on the drawing, it will
recognize the same closed off area as a valid boundary whereas before it
would not. Why is this? I have made no changes to that particular area of
the drawing? Why does it sometimes recognize it as a valid boundary and
other times, it doesn't?

M Ridzon

[m_ridzon]

I zoomed out and zoomed in to another part of the drawing. But I did not actually change the UCS at all.

M Ridzon

[ArCADian]

Hatch is a weird tool. It helps to have all of your selected regions on the screen at one time.

Also, avoid entering extraneous commands while the hatch window is open, such as ortho, opening snap dialogue, etc.

If those don't work, you know, use the EX, TR, or F:R:0 commands to tighten up your regions, and kind of check...it's sometimes surpring how those snaps disappear at the most inopportune moments.

I've found that not having a dialogue box in the middle of your region helps, too.

[m_ridzon]

Thanks! I think I figured it out. Before you ever initiate the hatch command, you must have the areas that you want to hatch, entirely in the viewing screen. If one boundary is slightly out of the viewing screen, it will not detect it as a valid hatch boundary.

Also, after you initiate the command and click the "pick points" button in the boundary hatch dialogue box, any area you want to hatch must stay entirely in the viewing screen at least until you select that area. After you've selected an area, you can safely move it out of the viewing screen and zoom to another part of the drawing to select another area without losing your first area. The key though is to have the area(s) of interest stay entirely in the viewing screen to select it before you move that area(s) off of the viewing screen. If you move an area of interest out of the viewing screen without first selecting it, moving it entirely back into the viewing screen will not make it a valid hatch boundary that is detectable.

This is the most temperamental tool I've found in CAD yet. This is programmed poorly and needs redesigned at Autodesk.

M Ridzon

[ArCADian]

For sure.

I looked in my manual to brush up on custom hatch creation, but I have yet to get a working knowledge, specifically the coding process and or language.

C'est la vie, pour maintenant.

[teiarch]

m_ridzon: Your "discovery" and opinions about hatching is shared by many.

One thing you could try, assuming you use a pline for a hatch boundary, is "select objects" instead of pick point.

[ArCADian]

If you're not using pline, convert to pline w/ PEDIT, , select objects, ,, <0.000>,

you can design a button for it, too, but I'm not that good yet.

the drafting techniques group is a good place to psot/search for that sort of thing.

[jmattmcd]

I was having the same error message. Make sure layer "0" is on and unthawed. When I did that, the hatch worked fine.