Textures & Gradients

A fill can be a flat color, a gradient, a texture, or a texture over a gradient. Textures are drawn at a physical size on the sheet, so a gravel fill reads as gravel at plot scale rather than as noise.

Gradients

Fill Style on the Fill sub-tab offers three choices:

Fill Style	Behavior
Solid	One color, the default.
Linear Gradient	Blends from the fill color to an End Color across the shape, at an angle you set. 0° runs left to right and the angle increases counter-clockwise. The gradient is measured from the shape's own extents, so every shape gets a full sweep regardless of size.
Radial Gradient	Blends outward from the shape's center to its furthest edge.

End Opacity is separate from the main fill opacity, so a gradient can fade to nothing: a soft edge on a planting bed, a water body that shallows out, a highlight that dissolves.

Gradients apply to closed shapes, merged paths and circles, at layer level or as an object override, and a texture composes over the top of one.

Textures

Texture Type in the Settings section of the Fill sub-tab picks the pattern. The list is grouped:

Category	Contents
General	None, and Custom Image.
Landscape & Site	Grass, wetland, water, soil, mulch, sand, snow, thatch.
Hand Media	Marker streak, colored pencil hatch, watercolor wash, scribble, hand hatch, hand cross hatch, ink stipple.
Hardscape & Paving	Asphalt, concrete, paving, permeable pavers, cobblestone, brick, gravel, decomposed granite, riprap, wood deck, stone, rubber.
Stone & Building	Granite, limestone, slate, marble, tile, metal, wood, roof shingle, stucco, fabric, cork.
Hatches	Conventional drafting hatches: hatch and cross hatch, earth, concrete, diagonals, horizontal and vertical lines, grid.
Patterns	Geometric fills: dots, stipple, noise, checker, herringbone, diamonds, zigzag, honeycomb, scales, waves, basketweave, brick bond, triangles, concentric, plus signs, random dots.

Texture controls

• Texture Scale is the physical size of the pattern on the sheet. Because it is a paper measurement, a texture set on a 30×42 sheet will look proportionally larger on an 11×17; adjust when you change sheet size.
• Texture Rotation turns the pattern. Useful for running a wood deck or paving pattern with the geometry.
• Texture Opacity sets how strongly the pattern reads over the fill color.
• Custom Image: with the Image texture selected, browse to your own tile (PNG, JPEG or BMP). It tiles at the texture scale like any other.

Color and texture together

Line-art textures (the hatches, the geometric patterns, the ink marks in the hand media) take the fill color, so an earth hatch in brown and the same hatch in gray are one texture with two colors. The pigment textures (marker, colored pencil, watercolor) work by lightening and darkening instead, so the fill color carries through the media. Photographic tiles like granite and cobblestone bring their own material color.

Textures and Looks

A texture you set explicitly is honored in every look because that is the point of setting one. A surface with its texture left at None but tagged with a material is drawn by the look instead, which is what lets one document render as a CAD sheet, a marker rendering, or a watercolor without re-styling anything.

So the rule of thumb: set a material when you want the look to decide, set a texture when you have decided.