Pipe Hatch Draworder

[bmossman]

In civil3d 2007, is there a wat to control the profile pipe hatch draw order?

[Anonymous]

I am also wondering if anyone has found a solution yet to having the pipe walls displayed above the hatch? The plots look fine because I'm plotting with lines merge turned on, but I'd still like to see it displayed correctly in the dwg.
In the attached screenshot the walls of the pipes and manholes are suppose to be green, but the hatching is obscuring them.

[T_Bernhard]

It's been requested. 2008?

Trevor

[Anonymous]

2008 is here, the display order is still messed up.

Hatch on top of the pipe wall. Not very good looking. Been this way since the beginning. To us, hatching would be very usefull if the hatch were in the back. The way it is... useless.

Clem

[Mark_Castle]

I thought I'd give this thread a bump, as it seems things are still the same (I'm using C3D 2010). Attached is my example with the pipe hatch on top of the inside walls. Any improvement in 2011? As stated above, we should have the means to control draw order within a pipe syle. At the very least, hatching should default to the back.

[ray]

Would it be possible to QSELECT the layer that the pipe walls are on and DRAWORDER it back?

[Hidden_Brain]

not at work right now, so cannot test and taking a wild guess: does changing the value for HPDRAWORDER help any?

[Mark_Castle]

Thanks for the suggestions, but I don't think the pipe objects can be manipulated with regular AutoCAD commands, as the pipe hatch is not really an AutoCAD hatch object, and I can't select the pipe hatch layer with Quick Select. Seems like you should be able to move the pipe components up or down in the display tab to manipulate draw order. Oh well, not that big a deal in this particular case.

[IslandGirl83]

Is there a solution to this issue yet? I just started at a new company that shades their pipes. They have only been using Civil 3D for about a year and have not found a solution to this problem yet. I have experience with civil 3d, but never have I shaded my pipes. 

We have Civil 3D 2011.

[ryanlaughlin]

This is still broken in 2015. Useless.

[Joe-Bouza]

Before civil3d, did we hatch pipes. Wry much? Just asking

[ryanlaughlin]

It is useless to offer a feature that doesn't work. It's bittersweet. It seems like a great, new feature, until you realize it doesn't work, and then you're just upset that you knew about the feature to begin with because you can't use it.

[hencoop]

I have found a workaround to make the draworder not matter and provide a shaded fill for the pipes and structures.

I used the following:

• ANSI31 hatch pattern
• Color - whatever pen/width gives you Black and about 0.4mm pen width
• linetype Dot
• linetype scale tweaked until the dot spacing is about 0.02 inch or 0.5mm (measured from paper space or on output media)
• hatch scale tweeked until the dot spacing is about 0.02 inch or 0.5mm (measured from paper space or on output media)
• By tweeking the dot spacing and the pen thickness a good variety of grayscale can be generated from black pens
• There is a minimum effective pen width and that is dictated by the resolution capacity of your output device.  Dots will disappear if they are too small to be resolved by the device.  Most devices I've used can faithfully reproduce the dot patter in a minimum pen width of about 0.2mm or 0.008 inch.

Since the pattern is black it will not diminish aught from the pipe or structure lines.

Because it is a dot pattern it will appear as gray on the plotted output.

But, other linework will appear through it (it will not hide anything... which may be a good thing).

[Cadguru42]

I had actually forgotten about that bug. We tried using hatches for the pipe walls years ago but stopped because of this. You mean this still is an issue after 8 versions of the software?

[ryanlaughlin]

Yes. I know it's hard to believe, but it is true. The sad part is that this is probably something one of the product developers could fix over their lunch break. I don't know how to get them to address the issue, but it is a big enough issue that makes it so I will not use the feature. If there is a better way to get their attention, please someone tell me.

[Hidden_Brain]

Yes, tried to show proposed water lines on road profiles (water lines modeled using pipe networks, not pressure pipes) using 2014 a few days ago and rediscovered this issue.

[hencoop]

I will gladly share my styles if you want but they may need some adjusting for any plot device other than a raster plotter.  Autodesk has problems scaling annotation when a raster plotter is assigned to a pagesetup (everything is 12X too small) and I don't know if hatching has the same problem.  If it does, the values that I have used in my styles must be divided by 12.0 to correctly scale for any plot device other than a raster device.

Here is how it plots (from the preview of the post it appears that the image width may get compressed):

(The grid is similarly done with black lines with custom dotted linetypes that differ depending upon the largest prime factor of the target scale so that dots are at intersections and dot spacing appear at a standard unit of measure.  Three different pen widths are used to distinguish major index, minor index, and intermediate grid lines)

[ryanlaughlin]

Does your hatch not sit on top of your linework? It's hard for me to tell from your image. I can't have the hatching on top of the linework as it obscures the lineweights. If you have a work-around to keep the hatch below the linework, I would very much appreciate information on how to accomplish that. 

Sincerely,

Ryan

[hencoop]

Yes, the hatch is on top.  The original problem persists but this workaround uses a trick.
The trick is that the hatch is done in black color not gray. 

Because the hatch pattern is all black no difference can be seen as it sits on top because the black it adds covers the black that was already there.

They gray effect is from the pen width and the dot linetype applied using the carefully crafted hatch scale and entity linetype scale as I have described.

[ryanlaughlin]

Thank you for your workaround idea, but I'd rather not fuss with such a complex workaround for something so simple. I'd prefer to just not use the feature.

Thanks again, though, for your reply.