Drawing scale bricks

[Paul Fryer]

I am trying to draw a brick wall at 1/75 scale (model railway OO gauge).  All I want is a basic white brick with black joints (I will add brick colour later), in an arbitrary sized rectangle - I will probably extend it to fill the width of letter cardstock in landscape.  Bricks are typically 9" wide x 3" high in real life.  I can't find a way to do it without painstakingly drawing the whole thing in the actual sized rectangle.

I tried using a rectangle fill pattern from the rectangles library (DXF HATCHES DXF_AR-B816C) which fills the rectangle with a brick pattern OK as I resize it, but it comes in at an arbitrary size which depends on the drawing scale in effect at the time and the amount of zoom.  Even at 1:1, this fill isn't brick-sized, and I certainly can't zoom in x75 to get the pattern and then zoom out again even if it were.  There is also an actual brick pattern in the library, but it's the wrong size also and already coloured (which I don't want).

Any thoughts as to how I can do this apparently simple-sounding task?

Thanks,

Paul.

[DoctorMo]

A few ways to do this depending on what the desired end result is (add brick color later?). The easiest way for me would be create a custom brick pattern from the Hatches menu using the stock brick pattern.  The brick pattern is in a 2:1 aspect ratio so it needs to be adjusted to a 3:1 ratio for your 3" x 9" brick pattern then it needs to modified and scaled down.

I would take a standard paper size document at 1" = 1" and draw a large rectangle (3" x 9"±). Select the rectangle, go to the Hatch tool menu and select the stock Brick pattern.

At this point, you should have a rectangle filled with bricks at the default settings with the Hatches Tool Menu on the screen somewhere.  Now the trial and error process begins. The good thing is the minute you start hacking the hatch settings, the hatch is now named Other and you can always start over by reselecting the brick hatch. My description of how I did it quickly is below:

There are only two line paths in the Brick hatch so this pattern is pretty easy to edit. Set the path at the top of Hatch box to "Path 1 of 2" then select the Paths tab on the side and change the Y-shift from -14.17 to -6 and then change the path to top to "Path 2 of 2" and the Path X Shift from -14.17 to -9 and the Path Y Shift from -14.17 to -6.  Then go to the Dash tab, Path 2 of 2, and change the dash values from -14.17 to -6.

Your new brick pattern should be about twice the size you want so go to the Hatch tab on the side and set Scale to 50% which gets it pretty close. I created a 3" x 9" block and Morphed it down in size at 1/75 (1.3%) and it was close to the hatch size bricks that can be printed on your printer.

You can set the line thickness and color in for each of the two segments in the Style tab. Since the hatch is just lines and not individual objects, the background color is control by the overall rectangle line and fill color controls or a color image behind the hatch. I set the two line paths to grey and the rectangle background color to a rust color and it looked like an old brick wall. White and black looks like subway tiles if that is what you want.

When you are close enough, save and name the hatch and it becomes part of the Hatch list for future work.

[eazydave]

The Hatch scale is not the scale of the drawing. It is a Fine Scale parameter. Read up on that in the Help pages.  Fine Scale is like pen width or font size.  Three choices, inches - mm - points.  Work out what your 3" x 9" at scale then set according in the Fine Scale units of the Hatch Palette. Notice the main tab on Hatch palette has a Scale controller - use that to automatically adjust all the paths in the Hatch, then it is best to Normalize, this step tells EazyDraw to perform the calculations on the Hatch and apply -- all automatic, very helpful for complex hatches.

Or - Hatches are the proper solution but a simpler approach might be to just draw one or a few of your bricks the use Advanced Duplicate. That is all rather simple to do.

And - if you do have your fill's and colors applied, but don't want them showing, use Outline mode found on Format main menu.  But that will turn off a Hatch too, only shows "wire frame".

[Paul Fryer]

Thanks for those responses.  I hadn't realised that there was so much to hatching, and I will be experimenting with such customising as time permits.  In the meantime I have made a custom hatch as described which I will be using immediately.

Also, after initially posting, I did discover that Advanced Duplicate can simplify the manual drawing process, and it does allow me to put some variations into the bond pattern which will be useful in some situations.

So I will keep both approaches handy.

Thanks again.

Paul.

[DoctorMo]

The hatch is handy for some things like creating a simple brick pattern but I would tend to construct a wall out of individual rectangles using the duplication process in one way or another.  This way one can create some different bricks color shades, group them together then duplicate to get some color variation in the "wall". It gets pretty difficult to do much when the scale is 1/75 as the individual bricks will be really small but you can always try and see how it looks. A lot of trial and error to get something that looks ok when it is printed out.

[Paul Fryer]

Looking more closely at the photos of the prototype, I now see that the bricks were laid in different directions in different rows, thus making a regular brick hatch pattern unsuitable.  Duplicate Advanced seems to have worked well to replicate it however.  The small scale isn't a problem, as I set the drawing scale to 1:75, draw the bricks to their real world size, and zoom in as required when drawing.

What I have got now is a perfect wall of the predominant colour, which given the small scale will probably look OK (it's only ¾ inch high, 13 rows of 4" bricks).  But the walls are quite old, and heavily weathered and dirtied, and so there is some minor colour variation between the bricks.  I may play a little with  colour shades as you suggest to see what happens, but I have got to be careful not to get the appearance of a repeating pattern - some of my walls are 5 ft. (real feet) long which will require 6 copies of the wall pattern cut from my letter-size card stock placed end to end.

As you say, much trial and error, and it may not be worth it.

On Friday, November 24, 2017 at 9:44:04 PM UTC-5, Paul Fryer wrote: