How to fix a blown out Hatch pattern

This little gem has plagued AutoCAD for years and years. You place a Hatch (AR-Conc, Gravel, AR-Sand) at a huge coordinate like 500000, 500000,0 and it just doesn't look right. It's like someone exploded it and the lines went everywhere. This doesn't happen if the drawing is near the UCS 0,0,0 origin.



This is a known issue but it only happens with certain hatch patterns.

You can fix this in AutoCAD (2006 and higher) by making some minor adjustments. By default the origin for the hatch is the UCS origin (0,0,0). However, you can specify a new Hatch Origin to avoid this issue.

Double click the Hatch to bring up the Hatch Edit dialog


First select the option "Specified Origin" in the lower left of the hatch dialog. Then to use a default "Bottom Left" (you have 4 choices here) just check the box "Default to Boundary Extents".

When creating a new Hatch in a drawing like this, ensure you change the option to "Default to Boundary Extents" to avoid this problem.