Creating custom walls with hatching

[Anonymous]

Hey Everyone,

I've been racking my brain for hours, trying to get a different hatching pattern on my wall, and I've had zero luck.  I've tried searching Google, again with no luck, so I'm hoping someone can help me with my "User Error".  I'm trying to create a different type of wall, with "siding" on it.  I'm calling it "Siding", as the "Wood Board Wide" hatch looks exactly like siding.  So, here's what I'm doing, and hopefully someone can show me where I'm messing up.

Pick an existing wall style and add it to a drawing.  

Head to the Style Manager>Architectural Objects>Wall Styles and duplicate the style of the wall I just added (we'll use Brick-4 as the example)

I've created a new Material Definition for my "Metal Siding" called "Metal Siding" (appropriately enough).

In the "Display Properties" I'm editing the "General Medium Detail".

Once I get to the "GMD" properties window, I'm skipping over the Layer/Color/Linetype to the Hatching Window.

This is where I fall off the rails, as I'm not sure what to do at this point.  If I alter any of those hatches, the Brick that's currently the hatch (because i'm trying to change it), disappears, and I'm left with a blank wall.  I'm not really sure what to do at this point.  Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.  Thanks.

KPM

[David_W_Koch · Accepted solution]

I assume that you are editing the Material Definition in your second image, as General Medium Detail is a Display Representation of Material Definitions.

First thing to correct:  you do not want to be editing the Drawing Default display settings.  Instead, you want to create a style-level display override for each Display Representation for your Material Definition, and then make the changes there.  If you look at the out-of-the-box Material Definitions, you will see that they all have style-level display overrides.

If you are trying to add a hatch to represent siding on the face of the outermost Wall component, you will want to apply your siding hatch to the Surface Hatch component.  The Plan Hatch component, when on, would be seen in a "plan" view (top view direction) and the Section Hatch component would be seen in a section view.

You are also going to want to stretch your dialog to be a bit wider (or use the slider bar) so that you can see the rest of the columns on the Hatching tab.  Depending upon how the hatch definition that you use is set up, a Scale/Spacing value of 3 may not work, and the Angle, Orientation, Offsets and whether or not the hatch should be Annotative can also affect what you see on the Wall.

Another item to consider:  When creating a new Material Definition, in the General Medium Detail Display Representation, on that Layer/Color/Linetype tab that you skipped over, the Surface Hatch component is turned off.  So it will not matter what you do on the Hatching tab - the Surface Hatch component will not display unless you turn it on.  You may also want to change other properties (layer, color, linetype, lineweight, etc.) for that component if you do turn it on, unless you want it to inherit everything from the layer of the parent Wall object.  Odds are those settings are a lot heavier than what you would want to see in Surface Hatch on a Wall.

I did a really quick experiment, focused only on the General Medium Detail Display Representation and the Surface Hatch component.  Here are the Layer/Color/Linetype and Hatching tabs of the style-level override settings on my "Siding" Material Definition.

 

And here is the result, on a test Wall, which has but one component, to which the Siding Material Definition has been applied.  The 10'-0" high Wall has 20 6"-high bands of siding.