Extrude Hatches

It's very common to use hatches in plan drawings. When you build a 3d drawing you may base it on a 2d plan drawing. When creating a 3d drawing you can extrude polylines and other closed linear entities to create 3d solids. It can get very time consuming when you need to subtract solids from those entities. With hatches it's very common to add islands to a hatch, a gap in the hatch. If you have a large plan drawing with a lot of hatches containing islands it's particularly useful to use 'Extrude Hatches'. After you select the hatches you have several options before extruding them. You can set the height and if they should be erased after extrusion. You can also specify on which layer the solid should be placed. By default the command will place the solid on the layer of the hatch it's extruded from. You can also choose to use the current layer. That way the solids will be all on the same layer. The most intelligent solution however is to choose designated layer. This works best when you work with a particular naming strategy in your layers. For example, if your plan drawing has the element grass in it, hatches representing grass should be on the layer 'grass-h'. Any boundary used for it should be on the layer 'grass-b'. If you apply this principal the 'Extrude Hatch' command can place new solids on a designated layer that can be created by the command itself. In the example of grass it will be placed on the layer 'grass-s', in which the last s stands for solid. With this option you can keep your drawing clean and organised and hatches and solids separate. After confirming the settings the command will extrude the hatches you selected with the height you specified. The solids will have gaps where the hatches have islands. This will save you a lot of subtracting.