January Tech Tip!

Modifying the Hatch Pattern for Revit Materials!

Well, I would like to take this time for this month’s tech tip to share with you a little something that, I’m sure most of you may know, but on the chance that you don't and those of you that are new to Revit, will benefit all of us.

I know some of you have thought about this and wanted to know how to change the hatch patterns in Revit to suit your office standards and have found it not easy to do. If you remember when you had to change them in AutoCAD, you had to find the pattern file and modify it so that it would pull into the system and therefore be available to you when you wanted to hatch something.

Well, Revit is not all that different and I will show you in the following process how to go about modifying or adding hatches to the Revit interface.

In the following example I will show you three walls that I will make changes to and give you the opportunity to see those changes.



As you can see already we have some hatch in there for the Gyp. Board but you can't really see it. Yes I know that scaling would work its magic and zooming in on the wall would help us see, but I just want to show you the process and not worry about the preciseness of the graphics; at least not until you need it to be.

I want to show you first that making a change to the hatch pattern is real easy and once you get the motions down you will feel very comfortable in messing around with your own creations of hatch. Maybe you already have hatches you created, well; this will be the way to add them.

Let’s first start off with changing the Basic Wall Generic - 8” wall to see the hatching we want to work with. I decided to work with the sand hatch since most of the time we want to see it on concrete surfaces, Gyp. Board walls and under a slab for the impacted fill.

So . . . select the 8” wall, open up the type properties and edit the structure.

Next you will want to pick on the materials button to choose a material.

Now you will want search for the Gypsum Wall Board to make the change to the cut pattern. All it takes is typing in the letters “GYP” and it will find the material. Once found, select it and you will see that the “Graphics” tab will activate and bring up the patterns for the Shading, Surface Pattern and Cut Pattern of the material. You will want to choose the “Cut Pattern” since we are seeing the wall in the plan view cut at 4’-0” above the finished floor. Select the area where the Pattern states “<none>”. This will bring you to the fill patterns dialog box.

As you can see there are two hatches labeled as Sand: “Sand” and “Sand - Dense”.

Select the “Sand” pattern and click on OK until you get back to your modeling space. You will see the hatch pattern come in the cavity of the Generic 8” Wall.

Now I want to show you another way to get to the materials and their cut patterns to modify the hatch.

Go to the “Manage” tab, under the “Settings” panel, and then click on “Materials”.

This process automatically brings you to the Material Browser in which we selected the Gypsum Wall Board last time going through the wall’s type properties. This process will allow you to globally change a material without having to find the specific model element and open up its type properties. This time you will notice that the material “Gypsum Wall Board” already has a pattern associated with it from the previous practice.

I want to try a different hatch to see if it makes it better so let’s choose the pattern they already have installed, “Sand Dense”.

 

Hit “OK” until you get back to your work space. We will notice that given the difference in the scale and the pattern the two walls shown below look similar but really the scale makes the difference and I may still want the hatch to be denser.

Here I have modified the walls shaded colors to show them in a different light. Notice that you really can't see the hatch for the gyp board in the other two walls. This is with the “Sand” pattern file.

Here is a closer look at the Basic 4 7/8” wall.

Now if we were zoomed up on this wall as tight as I am now we would have no problem, but I know some of us out there want it to show up better without having to zoom in.

Okay, now that I have shown you the main process of changing the hatch for a material lets back up to right before we change the pattern and lay out the process of creating/adding/modifying a hatch pattern.

To start off we need to find the main pattern file that Revit uses. To do this I simply did a search for the file “revit.pat” and it found several files since I have more than one version installed. To make it easy I will provide the path for the Windows 7 64bit OS with Revit 2014 installed:

If we open the file up with our Notepad you will see a bunch of number separated by commas. As you may have guessed these are our hatches. You will want to scroll through the file to find the sand hatches or do a simple CTRL+F to search for sand and it will take you straight to it.

For this demonstration all I want to do is to copy the sand hatch pattern and make a new .pat file so that I can import it into the new hatch and change the scale. So copy this text making sure you select everything from the asterisk symbol before “sand - dense, . . . “ to the one before “Sand, . . .” as shown below.

Paste this text into a new .txt file and save the file with the .pat extension. Remember to make sure you can see the file extension in your windows browser or it will keep it a txt file and it will not work with the Revit patterns. If you have to change it after the fact make sure you say yes to the warning message of changing the file type that windows pops up on your monitor.

I called my file sand2.pat

Now let’s get to the task at hand and finish this process.

Go back to your Revit session and go to the “Material Browser”. However you get there is ok as either way will do what we need it to do.

We want to first make a new material for the gypsum wall board so we don't change everything that is linked to the default “Gypsum Wall Board” material. Simply “Right-Click” on the material and select “Duplicate” and rename it per your liking. I chose to keep the main part of the name and only add “Dense Hatch” to it. You could make this any material in the book.

Make sure you have the new material selected before continuing as it is this material’s cut pattern we want to change.

As you go to change the pattern you will notice in the top right of the dialog box three buttons, one of which is labeled “New”. Select that button and follow the steps below.

1. Pick the radial button for “Custom”.
2. Select the “Import” button.
   
   
   
   
   
3. Browse to where you saved the new pattern file we created a few minutes ago. Hit “Open” when located.
   
   
   
   
   
4. Now choose some scales for the “Import Scale” to make it either less or more dense than the default patterns. I worked with several different scales before I picked the scale of (.1). I wanted to make sure I could see a difference especially for this article.
   
   
   
   
   
5. Finally you will need to give it a name that is different than all the ones currently loaded.  I want mine to be "Sand Dense 2".
   
   
   

Once we have completed this step we can hit OK until we get back to our workspace, as long as we selected the new material, if not then we have to make sure that is selected and modified before continuing.

I’m going to let you make a copy of the one of the walls and change its material in the structure of the wall so that the new material will be allocated to the gyp board or in the example of the 8” wall the entire wall. The example below shows the 4 7/8” partition wall with the two different patterns, both at the 3/4” = 1’-0” scale.

And here is the 8" wall with the new material.

Well, this does it for the tech tip this month. I know that this scale of the sand pattern may not be feasible in most applications. I wanted to show the difference between changing the scale factor on the hatches you create versus the ones loaded by default. I did not have to create any new patterns, with inputting new numbers in the pat file, nor did I have to download any from the Internet. All I did was take what I already had and make a new file, load it and change the scale and there you have it.

We at Sterling Systems can help you with your technical issues and your business needs. Just give us a call at (480) 719-4599 and we'll be happy to assist you.

Steve Coburn, Applications Engineer