hatch editing

[scz]

I have a cornice of corbelled brick, achieved by sweep profiles in the Assembly Editor.

Is there any way to edit the hatch so it shows as a running bond, rather than the stack bond pattern it's defaulting to (see attached pic).

Thanks!

[sbrown]

you just need to create a new material with the surf pattern you want, then assign that material to you wall sweep.

[scz]

Thanks Scott, sounds easy enough.

Though when I look in the Help menu to see how to create a new pattern, it says:
"For information on using a custom pattern file, follow the procedure in Creating a Custom Fill Pattern."

Okay, I check Creating a Custom Fill Pattern in the menu and it says:
"See Custom Pattern Files for information on creating a custom pattern (PAT) file."

Circular references! D'oh!

Can you point me a little further down the road? Can I create the new pattern within Revit, or do I need to go into CAD, or... ?

I'm assuming I'll need to create a new custom pattern that's just offset from the original "brick."

Thanks again!

[Andre Carvalho]

If you have the PAT file you want to use (you may look for it on the web) you just go to the Settings menu > Fill Patterns > New > Custom > Import > bring your PAT file.

I hope it helps,

Andre Carvalho

[tomnewsom]

If the cornice is set to use a material that has Running bond assigned, then creating a new pattern won't help.

I think this is an alignment issue. Try selecting the individual parts of the surface patter - can they be moved around independaently on each surface? try using the Align tool to get alternate courses to align...

[patricks]

If those 3 corbeled courses are actually 3 separate sweeps, then you just need to tab select a vertical joint line on the middle course and move it half of you brick length one way or the other.

[scz]

Let's back up a second...

Can I create/edit a .pat file in Revit directly, or does it require a different program?

I don't currently have the pattern I want.

Heaps of thanks!

[patricks]

So what you want is not the running bond that is there along the lower portion of your wall?

I have always created fairly simple brick bond patterns by hand in Notepad, and then I save it as a .PAT file.

[scz]

Still curious regarding that last question about creating the .pat, but Patricks, you're on the money! Thanks!

[patricks]

You should have a text file somewhere that shows how to create patterns in Revit using a text editor. Ours is in our material library folder.

[sbrown]

You can only create simple hatch patterns in revit itself, Ie parallel lines at a specific spacing or cross hatch as whatever spacing. Revit uses .pat file just like autocad with one twist, model vs drafting. Which you will read about when you open the revit.pat file.

[hugh.69031]

If those 3 corbeled courses are actually 3 separate sweeps, then you just need to tab select a vertical joint line on the middle course and move it half of you brick length one way or the other.

Why are the corbelled courses showing a horizontal stacked bond? If the corbeled courses were each seperate sweeps then would not each course's pattern be already in position or if not, be adjustable as described?

However, creating a custom staggered brick model pattern is not particularly difficult and you can even automate most of the process with hatch utilities. You may find an example to adapt among patterns available from RevitCity or similar sites found here (http://www.hatchkit.com.au/HatLinks).

Hugh Adamson
Cadro Pty Ltd
www.cadro.com.au (http://www.cadro.com.au)

[tomnewsom]

Creating .PAT files by hand is mysterious voodoo that I have to relearn every time I want to do it. So I avoid doing it as much as possible!

[patricks]

Why are the corbelled courses showing a horizontal stacked bond? If the corbeled courses were each seperate sweeps then would not each course's pattern be already in position or if not, be adjustable as described?



Patterns always start from a certain point. So even if those 3 courses in the image above are using a brick running bond pattern, if they are 3 separate sweeps, then the pattern is starting over for each sweep. Since each sweep is only 1 course high, and the pattern is starting in the same place on each sweep, then it will look like a stack bond. You can then adjust the position of the middle course's vertical joints to get the proper running bond.

[Rick Houle]

I do most of the hatch editing here for people.
(i had almost purchased a hatch maker but never think about it until i get a request)

I have a personal PAT file that is my own (with proper header info for Revit). This is where i put all my custom PAT jobs only. I may copy paste a similar pattern from the Revit.pat or occassionally look into my acad.pat for guidance... (remembering to add the Revit TYPE line)... I have even created complex hatches in cad via a lisp routine (which i no longer advise)... AND TO ACCOMPANY this pat file, i have a Custom Pattern.RVT file where end users can pull from... This helps me because i can see what i did in previous hatches and just steal text lines from one to suit the other...

Warning, pat files can get ridiculously long, especially ones coming from cad. You should not have a brick pattern that is five thousand lines long... Revit may not appreciate this too much. I had delivered a big ugly hatch once to a Revit team working on a huge project. Revit accepted the pattern and let them apply it. But from that point forward you could not touch anything that had that pattern, including the pattern itself, w/o a fatal error. We had to roll back to previous save.

[patricks]

Yeah I've seen some of those Sand PAT files and those are crazy long.

I don't even want to know what some of the Stone hatch patterns we have in are template look like. Sometimes I wish there was a way to extract a PAT file from a pattern already loaded into a project. We got those patterns from some file posted on here years ago, so we don't have the actual PAT files for those stone patterns.

[Rick Houle]

That would be nice... I had wished for a pat extractor back in cad too...

So you know,
the stone hatches we use are free from Cultured Stone. They have a subdirectory of stone PATs that work with Revit (not all do). Those are the only stone hatches we currently provide in our Revit library. They are long... some of them 1,500 lines or more... but they have been trouble free so far.

You have to download and install their freeware to get to the directory of pats.

[tenghui2000]

the code is pretty much the same as CAD pat file. You can learn the logic just by studying the CAD pat file.

[hugh.69031]

Warning, pat files can get ridiculously long, especially ones coming from cad. You should not have a brick pattern that is five thousand lines long...

The largest hatch pattern I've seen so far (for a roof tile) had just under 20,000 lines and was probably generated. How some generators can do this is discussed here:

http://www.hatchkit.com.au/faq_detail.php?id=9

Further tips:

http://www.hatchkit.com.au/faq.php

Hugh Adamson
Cadro Pty Ltd
www.cadro.com.au (http://www.cadro.com.au)

[hugh.69031]

... Sometimes I wish there was a way to extract a PAT file from a pattern already loaded into a project. We got those patterns from some file posted on here years ago, so we don't have the actual PAT files for those stone patterns.

The following is extracted from here (http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=79856) :

Via HatchKit, (http://www.hatchkit.com.au/) for each Revit drawing

Export drawing as an AutoCAD DXF file
Open DXF file with HatchKit
For each custom pattern in HatchKit pattern dropdown
Assign a pattern name and description
Save in appropriate Revit pattern file format.
Or, via GETPAT (search the web), for each Revit drawing:

Export drawing as an AutoCAD DXF
Open file with AutoCAD
Load GETPAT
For each custom pattern in drawing
run GETPAT
follow prompts
It's moot which approach is more effort.


Hugh Adamson
Cadro Pty Ltd
www.cadro.com.au (http://www.cadro.com.au)

[david.fannon]

Just because there was a question early on about using the help, and it did not seem to get answered: In addition to the txt file Patricks mentioned that contains the "worked example" there is also a section in the help called "Creating a Custom Pattern" which walks through generating an example paver pattern. This is handy because it illustrates each step.

Of course this page does not include the terms "Fill" or "Hatch" so it is not easy to find. Even worse, another page called "Creating a Custom Fill Pattern" describes only the bare-minimum parallel lines and cross hatch you can do inside Revit, and does NOT link to the directions for editing the *.pat file using a text editor. Even from the Root page "Fill Patterns" you need to thread your way through two other pages to get here.

Not the best technical writing ever.