Paint Tips

Paint fills an area from the CAD lines around your click, so nothing is traced by hand. Check first whether you need it at all: an area that is already a closed polyline fills faster from its layer (see Which Tool Fills It?). The Paint reference has every detail.

Set Up Before You Click

  • Select the layer first. Paint works on the layer selected in the tree when you start it, and the status bar names it. Click a layer row at any time to paint on that one instead.
  • Turn off lines that should not split the surface. Hidden layers, and layers faded by an isolation, do not bound an area. Isolate the layer whose lines you want, or hide a floodplain limit that runs through a lawn.
  • Choose what it paints with. Layer's style, the default, keeps the layer as the one place to restyle. A color or a material becomes the area's own fill, and Clear All Overrides hands it back to the layer.

While You Paint

  • Rest the pointer before you click. Studio shows the area it would fill. If it is wrong, a gap or a stray line is the reason, and you find out before painting anything.
  • Leave Join on. A lawn that a line crosses paints as one surface with no seam. The preview outlines, dashed, the areas a click will join. With Join off, Shift+click joins.
  • Fence for many areas. Turn on Fence in Paint's row and click across them. Enter shows what it found, a click leaves an area out, and Enter again paints the rest as one undo step.
  • Reuse a color in one click. The strip under the swatch keeps your last eight colors.

Changing What You Painted

  • Click to repaint. A click inside an area painted differently repaints it like a paint bucket. If a line split off the part you clicked, only that part changes.
  • If it lands in the wrong place in the stack, use Send to Front or Bring Layer to Front in the tree. A new area normally goes under the linework and above an aerial.

When Paint Is Not the Quickest

  • Lots and tracts: use Land Use, which also names and counts them. An area with a land use is never joined, so two lots stay two lots.
  • Lawns and beds on every project: draw them as closed polylines in CAD, on their own layer. A recipe then fills them in one step, and they come back with every re-export.
  • A layer that was left out of the export: check before painting. Re-exporting with the layer included gives you the real geometry.