Making a PAT File from a Picture

Pattycake Disclaimer

Introduction

You are designing a space, you find the perfect pattern image on pinterest, maybe google… and you need to incorporate it into your documentation — how does it happen?

Procedure

There are actually a couple different ways you could make this happen. In this workflow, we will utilize Pattycake and Revit. In this particular post, we will use Pattycake’s Drawing Canvas feature to complete the task. For more precision, you may want to investigate using the Pattycake DXF to PAT generator.

Pattycake Drawing Canvas

The drawing canvas is great for quick representations of files, along with drawing more complex orthogonal files. For this, we will use it to generally represent the pattern with single lines for the ‘bars’.

Step 1 - Design

Design however you do you. For this project, we are going to pretend we are making a custom residential railing.

Here, we are using AI as a first image generator for inspiration (why not), and then refining the pattern using detail lines in a drafting view in Revit (embedding the image in Revit to reference). You can of course use any method that works for you, whether CAD, sketching, etc. Different strokes for different folks.