Consistent Pattern Appearance

If you use a lot of hatching or crosshatching in your designs this tip might be of interest. Anyone who uses hatching or crosshatching is familiar with setting spacing and angles and keeping them consistent. What is usually not so apparent is the affect of the data point used to accept the hatch and fulfill MicroStation’s request “Accept @pattern intersection point”. This point defines the intersection point of the hatch being placed. If the same point is always used for each hatch placed then the look of adjacent hatched areas or elements will line up nicely throughout the design. A very good procedure to produce this type of consistent hatch is to use the key-in “xy=0,0” instead of a random data point whenever accepting hatch placement.

If you do a lot of this it would even be worthwhile to set a function key to this key-in command.