You can modify both the pattern fill and the boundaries of hatches. You can also modify solid-filled areas, but the method you use depends on whether the solid-filled area is a solid-filled hatch, a 2D solid, or a wide polyline or donut.
Hatching can produce a very large number of line and point objects. Although stored as hatch objects, these line and point objects do use disk space and take time to generate. If you use a relatively small scale factor when hatching an area, the hatch could require millions of line and point objects, thus taking a very long time to complete and possibly exhausting the available resources. You can avoid this problem by imposing a limit on the number of objects created by a single HATCH or BHATCH command. If the approximate number of objects needed for a particular hatch (considering the boundary extents, pattern, and scale) exceeds the limit, AutoCAD LT displays a message indicating that the hatch scale is too small or that its dash length is too short, and the hatch request is rejected. If this occurs, carefully examine your hatch parameters. The scale factor may be unreasonable and may need to be adjusted.
The hatch object limit is set by the MaxHatch environment setting, which is stored in the system registry. Its default value is 10000; however, If you must create very dense hatches, you can edit the MaxHatch=10000 line, assigning any value from 100 to 10000000 (10 million). If you specify a number outside this range AutoCAD LT uses the default value (10000).
You can modify the pattern properties, such as scale and hatch angle, of an existing hatch, or you can choose a new pattern for it. You can also explode a hatch pattern into its component objects.
Hatch boundaries can be copied, moved, stretched, and so on. You can also use grips to stretch, move, rotate, scale, and mirror hatch boundaries and their associated hatches just as you do other objects. If the editing you do maintains a closed boundary, an associative hatch is updated automatically. If the editing produces an open boundary, the hatch loses any associativity with the boundary and remains unchanged. Associativity may also be lost during editing of a hatch boundary if the hatch pattern file is not available at the time of editing.
Hatch associativity depends on whether you choose Associative in the Boundary Hatch (BHATCH) and Hatch Edit (HATCHEDIT) dialog boxes. Nonassociative hatches are not updated when their original boundary is changed. You can remove hatch associativity at any time, but once it is removed for an existing hatch, it cannot be reestablished. The hatch must be re-created to restore associativity.
Solid-filled areas can be represented by
You modify each of these solid-filled objects just as you would any other hatch, 2D solid, wide polyline, or donut. In addition to DDMODIFY, you can use HATCHEDIT for solid-filled hatches, grip editing for 2D solids, and PEDIT for wide polylines and donuts.