Monday, January 14, 2013

Revit Hatch patterns revisited

A long time ago I talked about the in's and out's of hatch patterns in Revit and how they are made from scratch. I'm not sure why the universally used functionality hasn't been addressed in any shape or form by the Factory but thanks to some talent out there in the world, there are easier ways to address patterns. I recently came across Hatch22, a fairly easy-to-use Revit Add-in that addresses the missing functionality. It's Pay as you Please and worth a look if you find yourself in need of non-standard patterns. I found the instructions fairly concise and thorough except for a few things: The View type (Dratfting/Detail/Model) in which you draw your pattern was vaguely referenced, and the wording describing how drawing Scale relates to the pattern and it's output was unclear. The plugin dialog looks like so:

You essentially draw your pattern and pattern boundary in a Revit drafting view, and use the four line styles Hatch22 loads into the file to help the lines do what you want them to do.
The Add-in and a new pattern for a Perforated Ceiling tile
I found that it did not recognize circles, spitting out a blank boundary file and that it had some issue with some of the hexagon linework, to where it had to be "corrected". All in all it's a good tool and Gregory Mertens deserves some patronage for his work.
Cheers