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Creating Complex Boundaries with AutoCAD and 2D Hand Rendering Styling

I was doing some planning work for a new pond in my backyard and thought I would share a cool AutoCAD tip.

When drawing a 2D layout drawing of my yard’s landscaping I was presented with the problem of duplicating the flowerbeds border with the grass regions. Instead of copying and drawing outlines which could cause problems with the splines I used for the curved shapes, I used the trick of creating a new boundary polyline with a Hatch. Below is a tutorial on how you can do the same trick and as a bonus showed my design styled in Autodesk Impression.

So in this image you see the 6 regions I want defined for a polyline on a separate layer, but the boundaries of these objects is not drawn yet.

AutoCAD Showing the 6 Grass Regions

What I did was hatched the 6 regions I wanted to create a boundary for using the AutoCAD command BHATCH.

c AutoCAD Hatch object of the 6 Grass Regions

I then double-clicked on the new Hatch which brings up the Hatch Edit dialog. I then selected the option to “Recreate Boundary” then accepted the default option to create a Polyline and boundary not Reassociate the Hatch to the new boundary.

Using the AutoCAD Hatch Edit dialog. 
AutoCAD Hatch Edit Boundary Type option AutoCAD Hatch Edit Boundary Reassociate option

Now delete the Hatch object and you are left with a polyline boundary of the regions you hatched. This is much faster than other methods to create the new boundary layer. I could also just keep the Hatch objects on a separate layer and even use AutoCAD Fields to display the square footage of my grass covered areas. In a past popular blog post “StarBacks BBQ Floor Space Planning with AutoCAD FIELDS” I showed how to show a hatch objects area and even use that area value for an AutoCAD or Excel table and calculations. As Matt Murphy would say “ That’s Wicked Cool”.

 Newly Created Grass Boundary Polylines in AutoCAD 2010

To make the design nice and visually pleasing instead of just a collection of lines, I styled my design using Autodesk Impression. Below are the hand rendering styled images created with Autodesk Impression 3 in less than five minutes.

The best part is the rendering is vector based drawing and if I update the DWG file I can simply update the rendering in Impression instead of starting back from scratch in a raster editing program or using traditional pens, markers or watercolor.  In less than five minutes I imported the DWG and styled it in a colored pencil then changed my mind and in less than one minute changed to an overlapping marker style.

Landscaping 2D Rendering in Autodesk Impression Landscaping 2D Rendering in Autodesk Impression

Autodesk Impression is a free download for many Autodesk Subscription customers.

Update 5/11/09
Tom Kelly pointed out another excellent method to create  the outline of a region in the comments to this post. Use the Boundary command “BO”. So many commands, so little time. Thanks Tom.

Cheers,
Shaan

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