Hatches? We Don't Need New Stinkin' Hatches?

“The biggest difference between time and space is that you can't reuse time”

Merrick Furst quotes

I sometimes find that the coolest new stuff in Inventor is sometimes what appears to be the simplest.

One of those subtle tools is Inventor's ability to reuse hatches patterns from AutoCAD.

I've reused an AutoCAD hatch in the dovetails
(click to enlarge)

For background, AutoCAD stores it's hatch patterns as a file with a *.pat extension.

Now, all you have to do is browse from Inventor to one of those hatch files, and viola! You can reuse those hatches in Inventor! No trying to figure out how to recreate them, or opening an Inventor dwg in AutoCAD to reuse the hatches in AutoCAD

It's all there in one nice little package!

But enough writing about it! Here's a quick video on the actual doing!