Feedback Needed: Dropping Gradients. Using Hatches with Background Color Instead

Hi all! I want to reach out early on this feature change to Site Color and Color Render for hatches in the AutoCAD plugin that we’re strongly considering going ahead with, to get your input and feedback.

The Change:

Color Render will stop creating a duplicate hatch. Color Render will instead use the Background color native ACAD property in the Properties palette.

Pros:

• No more double hatches - groundcovers, shrub areas and RefNote areas will be easier to manipulate with color render turned on, since it’s just one hatch now.
  
• It will be significantly faster to turn on color render. Especially once we couple this with another big change we planning to complete in 2026 to move the color hatches into the regular plant symbols and give the ability to choose any color for trees and shrubs.
  
- No more drawing extra hatches, no more swapping out blocks. Even on a large plan the color render tool should turn on in a quarter of the time or faster.

• Slightly smaller file size and slight file performance speed improvement since there’s now half the hatches.
  
- I’m attaching a simple case study DWG with over 400 hatches with PDFs to see the file size differences and the performance. Fair warning, it’s still a bit laggy with so many hatches.
- We already removed gradients from the tree and shrub color blocks 10 years ago (Update 11.42, June 19, 2015) due to the issues they caused.

• We will be able to implement the same options and result in other programs like Revit, SketchUp and Rhino.
  
• Improved technical support, reducing our ticket load.
  
- Many offices have submitted tickets to us where the inclusion of gradients resulted in them or their colleagues not being able to plot their plan. So why are we supporting this feature?

• Easier for our developers to maintain the Site Color and Color render features for all of our plugins.
  
- It will be the same features from plugin to plugin, simplifying development in the other platforms and debugging.
- This has significantly delayed new features in the past.
- We will still provide limited legacy support for existing gradients for 1 or 2 years: a plant or RefNote area that’s already assigned to a gradient will continue to render that gradient, but obviously not as a background color. You won’t be able to assign plants to gradients anymore, and any gradients in existing color wheel will be either stripped out or reverted to color 1 of the gradient. After 1-2 years we will need to also remove this legacy support, though.

Cons:

• No more gradients (that’s the only con).
  
- Gradients are not supported in AutoCAD’s native hatch background color feature, nor are you able to apply a gradient to anything except a solid hatch.
- They have not and are not adding gradient support to anything else, nor are they improving it.
- Color books also do not allow selecting a saved gradient.
- It’s a narrow feature with many performance and other issues.
- Gradients are not supported in SketchUp nor Revit.
- This has already caused issues with transferring a plan to Revit for some users, and extra work to reassign those colors to get color render to work in Revit.
- However, we’ve been wanting to pull gradient support for more reasons than this:
- Gradients, even on just a few hatches, adds a large file size to a PDF plot, requiring extra steps to rasterize the PDF.
- Controversial opinion? A plan with gradients is arguably a dated look.
- Adding gradients can still be achieved with our documented workflow to bring color render into photoshop, where you’d need to go anyway to rasterize the PDF.

Why do we want to do this?

• Take advantage of the hatch background color feature.
  
• Vastly simplify the Site Color and Color Render tools for the user, but also for our developers as we work to expand these tools on all platforms.
  
• Make the Color Render and Site Color experience the same in AutoCAD, Revit, SketchUp and Rhino.
  
• We want to prioritize the same functionality and look and feel of all of our tools across all of our supported platforms.
  
• Stop supporting gradients that end up resulting in support tickets blaming Land F/X of causing high PDF file sizes.
  

From our team’s perspective, the benefits of having gradients as an option no where near outweigh the issues caused by supporting gradients.

So this is our fair warning post that we’re moving towards this, and your opportunity to help us with this. Please reply with your thoughts. Maybe you agree and support this decision or let us know if we’ve missed any important reasons to keep gradients (or more reasons to let them go).

Edit:
To respond to common feedback: "Keep the existing hatches and hatch names."
- That's absolutely the plan. Those pattern names will remain the same. Our only plans are to add to that library of patterns. This is only regarding the solid fill or gradient hatch that gets created during color render to be a background color instead of a separate hatch object.