Plywood fill pattern

[michael.12445]

I'm drawing a series of details in detail views, and they all include one or more layers of plywood. I loaded the out-of-the-box Plywood-section.rfa detail component family, and noticed it uses a drafting pattern fill set to "align with element." Everything was fine as long as all my details had horizontal sheets of plywood, but when I tried to draw one with plywood installed vertically, the plies still came out horizontal, that is, perpendicular to the plane of the plywood sheet.

The help documentation - complete with illustrations - seems to say specifically that drafting pattern fills can rotate if they are set to "align with element," but this is not the way the plywood pattern fill is behaving in Revit Architecture 2009. I looked here and at revitcity.com, and there seems to be a lot of advice indicating that while model patterns can rotate, drafting patterns cannot (although it's unclear to which version of Revit the posts are referring).

I tried rolling my own pattern fill, since the format is just like an AutoCAD .pat file, with the addition of ;%TYPE=DRAFTING or ;%TYPE=MODEL at the head of the file. The drafting pattern I made behaves just like the original Revit one, i.e., no rotation. I tried making it into a model pattern, and while it will rotate in alignment with the object, Revit refuses to draw it at a scale that makes sense, i.e., with plies on the order of 1/8" thick (it won't allow the pattern to be defined this small, complaining "pattern too dense.")

So what's the trick? Is there some obscure setting, like the AutoCAD environment variable "Maxhatch" that can fix this? Or some other obscure setting like "Make drafting pattern fills behave as documented?" Or is Revit really incapable of showing plywood vertically in details, without resorting to a kluge like having to define a separate pattern fill that has the plies oriented vertically in the .pat file?

Thanks,

Michael Evans

[Kirk Bricker]

Michael,

Here are a few plywood detail components. Edit the families and take a look at how they were done.

Kirk

[patricks]

The Plywood.rfa family above is exactly what we use. Works fine in almost all cases unless your plywood sits at a 45 or near-45 deg. angle.

[dysart]

Here's my solution to plywood. It works at all angles.
It's the pattern type, model that lets it work. Bad for memory?

[JB27]

Old thread, but still a problem....

To dysart's point, model hatches do work better for aligning, especially if it's an angled object. I'm not sure if it becomes a memory issue, but the biggest problem I've had is that model hatches by their nature don't scale. This isn't a problem if you're working on a detail that only appears at one scale, but if you're using it in a view that shows at multiple scales (in this case, in a building section, wall section, and a detail or 2), it will only show correctly in one scale and not the others. My detail view looked great, but my building and wall section have a big black region instead of anything that looks like plywood. This could be solved by Autodesk, by allowing detail hatches to align to their objects (an option that exists but doesn't work for detail components). 8 years later, that still hasn't happened.