From the course: AutoCAD 2026 Essential Training

Using the Hatch command to highlight areas in AutoCAD drawings - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD 2026 Essential Training

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Using the Hatch command to highlight areas in AutoCAD drawings

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- [Instructor] We're starting a new chapter now where we're going to be taking a look at how we work with hatching and gradient fills to enhance your geometry in your AutoCAD drawings. Now we've got a new drawing for you to do this. It's called a metalplate_001.dwg. And as usual, you know the drill. You can download it from the library to follow along with the videos. Now when you open up the drawing in the model tab, you'll notice we are zoomed into the section view and the side view. If I zoom out slightly, you'll see that we do have a planned view of the metal plate as well. But we're going to be working with the section view and the side view. So make sure you are zoomed into those like so on the screen. Now the other thing you do need to check, make sure you are in the layers panel here on the home tab on the ribbon, and your layer is hatching so that you place your hatching on the appropriate layer. Now what we're going to do is we're going to place some hatching in the section view to highlight the areas that have been cut through in that section view in the drawing. So what we're going to do is we're going to go up to the draw panel on the home tab on the ribbon, click on the Fly out and select hatch. That will open up the hatch creation tab on the ribbon, which is a contextual tab that only kicks in when you're working with the hatch command. Now we need to make sure that we have an appropriate hatch pattern like so. There you go. ANSI31 is the one in the pattern. You can go down all these different patterns here, you'll notice. But just go to the top there. ANSI31 is a nice default hatch pattern that we can use. Now if I now hover over any area in the drawing, can you see there? If I hover now, you'll see that I can place the hatch. So if I go to pick points and hover there, can you see there's my hatch pattern kicking in like so. Now I need to make sure that the appropriate areas in the drawing are hatched. Now go to your Options panel here like so. So if I go to here like so and on the flyout, can you see there, you've got the option to create separate hatches? Now it's up to you if you want to do this. Ideally, really it should all be one hatch pattern for the section view, but if you want to create separate hatches of each area that you're hatching, you would switch that on like so. I'm going to switch it off in this case, we don't need separate hatches. It should all really be one hatch pattern. So I'm going to hover here. Can you see there? There's an area there to hatch. Hover here there's an area there to hatch and hover here there's an area there to hatch as well. Now this bit here is going to be the long hole in the plate in the plan view, so that wouldn't be hatched. When you cut through that, you'd actually be able to see that long filleted hole in the plan view. I'll show you what I mean in a moment. So these three areas here are also hatched. So click in each area and then all you've got to do is click on Close hatch creation like so. So they're now hatch neatly. If I zoom out slightly, can you see there? If you're doing a sectional view through that plan view, that slotted hole with the fillets at each end, you can see there that that actually would be that open area there like so. So zoom in again on the section view and the side view. So that's our hatching in place. Now, one thing before we leave this video that I want you to check is to make sure that it is all one hatch pattern. And that's really easy. You just hover over the hatch, click on it, and as you can see, it's all one object. It opens up the hatch editor, you'll notice on the ribbon. So you can go in and edit your hatch if you need to. And this little grip here is like the centroid grip of the hatch pattern as well. Hit Escape a couple of times just to obviously dishide the hatch and close the hatch editor. So that's how you would place some hatching in your drawing to highlight that section view to make it stand out. So the geometry looks much, much more obvious in that particular case.

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