Textures v. Hatches Question

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debenriver
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Textures v. Hatches Question

Post by debenriver »

I use both quite a lot but there is quite a difference when you come to make them smaller.

With a hatch, you can make the spacing quite small - like now I'm using a criss-cross (double) hatch at 0.25 pixels at 1:20 scale to show an epoxy fillet in small oddly-shaped gaps – it looks near enough like a solid colour fill but without the hassle of actually making a shape – the areas to be filled are a mix of straight lines and an outward radius – I want to fill on the convex side of the radius.

But if I try to do the same thing with a texture – scaling it to say, 0.1 it takes forever – for a very similar effect. And if I try to edit a texture to produce a very small result it also takes forever both to save the edit and to use it.

My question is - why are textures so different from hatches in this way? :mrgreen:

They both end up on the drawings sort of like a polygon - at least, to "un-group" them to their constituent lines you have to Convert to lines – then you can edit their lines as normal – so in that respect they seem similar.

Cheers -- George
Eric Pousse
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Joined: Sat Dec 03, 2011 12:31 pm
Location: Tours - France

Re: Textures v. Hatches Question

Post by Eric Pousse »

Bonjour George,

I am not sure to understand exactly but I try to respond ;-)
It can depend of how is define the texture : number of lines and size of its rectangle of definition.
If the rectangle of definition is small and/or the number of lines which define the texture is high, when you apply the texture, the number of objects created can be very high and the calculation can be slow...
Try to convert a hatch and a texture to lines and see the number of objects.

If you can use a hatch to do what you want, it is better.

Cordialement.
Eric Pousse
debenriver
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Joined: Sat Dec 03, 2011 9:19 pm
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Re: Textures v. Hatches Question

Post by debenriver »

Ah - yes.

I filled a 100 x 100 square (at 1:20) with a double hatch at 0.25 pixels – which gave the appearance of a grey fill. Converted to lines it was 320 lines.

When I filled the same square with a simple texture scaled to 0.1 it produced a similar effect (though not quite as dense and smooth) but converted to lines it was 5041 lines!

It's useful if you want to fill an awkward shape, specially a small one, with radii involved. If you make it into a polygon so you can fill it with a background, the radius becomes a lot of tiny lines and sometimes it's a pain to join those properly to the other lines. The shape I was filling looks like this at 3200 magnification:

Screen Shot 2018-03-07 at 15.38.56.png
Screen Shot 2018-03-07 at 15.38.56.png (29.02 KiB) Viewed 5166 times
With hatches it's very fast. I was wondering why it was so much slower with atexture - now I understand :mrgreen:

Cheers -- George
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