Revit Fill Patterns - Part 2

In my previous post on Fill Patterns, I mentioned the Revit Idea about "Double Patterns" being accepted bu Autodesk. Pieter Schiettecatte commented on that post about being surprised Revit could not do this when he first started using Revit. His comment inspired this post (thanks Peter!).

Although we cannot currently use two patterns at the moment, this is a trick to doing it when really needed. Simply combine the two patterns in the text file, creating a new pattern!

Notice, in the sample text file (Test.pat) below I copied the "Concrete" pattern from the Revit.Pat file (comes with Revit) and the "ANSI31" pattern from the Acad.Pat (comes with AutoCAD). I then created a new pattern by simply combining those two patterns to make a third option.

Here is the result in Revit for the sample pattern file and the three options...

To use the custom file in Revit, I clicked the Import button shown in the dialog above and browsed to the test file. There are lots of PAT files for AutoCAD (and Revit, they are just often called Acad patterns online) available via a web search.

• Revit's Revit.pat file is located here: C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Revit 2018\Data
  
• AutoCAD's Acad.pat file is located here: C:\Users\User\AppData\Roaming\Autodesk\AutoCAD 201?\R22.0\enu\Support

One more quick note about the dialog above, when a custom pattern is imported the scale can be set via Import Scale. This is a one-time opportunity, and if you get it wrong you have to delete the pattern and recreate it.

The Import Scale option can be used to create a new pattern without the need to edit the text file. For example, the Revit.pat file comes with a Block 8x8 pattern. If you need a 6.25" x 6.25" running bond tile pattern, just import the block pattern at the scale factor of 0.78125.

It would be nice if the Import Scale option offered and X and Y scale, rather than a just proportional. That would allow almost any tile size to be created quickly. Even better, a built-in feature to graphically edit and create fill patterns within Revit would be wonderful! I am not a big fan of editing text and xml files.