apparently theres a license for mbd that I dont have. is there any work around known to export my gd&t annotations as a step file for the programmers/machinists to see?
Have you tried just using eDrawings for free viewing of the file?
no, I want the annotations to come into my cam software.
I can’t imagine that SolidWorks would hold hostage exporting PMI and Model Views behind an MBD license if you didn’t need one to create them… Are you using the STEP AP242 version in your export options as I believe it is the only version to fully support them?
242 is indeed locked behind the MBD license. If your CAM software can read SW directly maybe it can read the PMI from the .sldprt?
sadly I tried that. those peckerheads mustve figured out how to block that
is there a means I can convert those annotations to a 3d sketch?
One of the worst decisions SolidWorks has made was putting MBD behind a paid license. In SolidWorks the drawing function is included. Paying thousands for the MBD module is not gonna fly for most companies. For 25+ years, everyone seemed to think that PMI/MBD will replace drawings. The longer I see how designs are manufactured, I still think drawings are necessary in most cases.
Kinda make sense.
Small shop don’t care much about MBD. Not even file export. “I can finish it with a file.”
Big shop want as much automation as possible. Will pay for technology.
Medium shop stuck at between. Want to automate but can’t pay the bill.
SW get the big shop to pay for MBD development.
well i have a try before i buy license. we’ll see how much i like it and if it’s gonna be of any use…
We’re a bespoke automation equipment design and build division. Most of our parts are relatively simple geometrically, although we do have decently tight tolerances on some features that we need to specify to the machinist. 2D drawings are not that much harder for us to create vs adding MBD annotations. We use multiple different machine shops, including overseas in low-labor-cost countries. We did make an effort to try out MBD, but it was tough for our suppliers to handle. Many of our parts don’t really require any CNC – Bent sheet metal, bars of stock cold-rolled steel cut to length with a few holes drilled/tapped/etc. These folks want to carry a piece of paper out to their manual machine. The equipment, software, etc to interpret the MBD, especially for non-cnc parts, was hard for them to process. We actually found out that some suppliers were taking our MBD files and creating 2D drawings to send to their shop! At that point we pretty much put an end to that effort.
However, the biggest takeaway we got from that process was that I discovered it is possible to embed/attach any type of file inside of a PDF. The macro we use to export PDFs automatically also exports a Parasolid and a STEP file from the 3D model at the exact same time, and attaches it to the PDF file using pdfTK (free download) and a command line. This has been a real game changer for us because there’s no separate file for anyone to have to manage. The attachment process also compresses the attached files, such that the PDF with attached STEP is smaller on disk than the original PDF and separate STEP file.
Luckily Solid Edge includes the manual PMI stuff OOTB and allows downstream consumption and export as well since that is the collaboration path used by an SE ↔ NX workflow.
What they do make you buy as an add-on is their Advanced PMI which basically adds automation features like Auto Dim/Annotate, a nice Model View palette in Draft and a MBD Publishing tool for auto-creating a PDF “drawing”.
Do take a test file. 242 is still updating. It depends on the software version you’re using and the one you send file to. Not everything will get across.
That is fantastic information, @josh! I’m looking into the pdfTK today. Do you have any other tips/tools to recommend?
How does that look on the vendor end? Is it obvious the PDF has an attachment? Those PDF attachments can easily go unnoticed. We send a zip file so the file content is obvious to the receiver.
It is not super obvious. That’s the biggest “weakness” we’ve found so far. Only the actual (free) Adobe Reader can see the attachments, and you do have to look for the little paper clip icon even then. You almost have to know it’s there, so it does require a little bit of supplier “training”. Basically we just have to tell them “open it with Adobe reader” and send a screenshot of where the paper clip icon is. Once you click the paper clip you can detach whatever files are included to any place on your computer. Much less headache than what we were trying to do with MBD. The export macro that does the attaching adds “_STP_XT” to the end of the drawing filename just to indicate that the attachment has happened. We also have a little note in the border of the drawing template that says “3D CAD attached to PDF if filename contains STP_XT.
I guess the main tip is “make the right way the easiest way”… pdfTK is really command-line only. It does have a GUI that you can install separately, but I think it has a lot less capability, maybe it can’t even attach. I never really looked into that much because I was gonna always do it with the PDF export macro we already use that does filename formatting/checking and automatically saves stuff in the right place. So yeah, definitely do the attachment with a macro. And as I mentioned to Dwight, as long as your standards allow it having an indication in the filename that attachment has occurred is helpful too. Sometimes we have to issue PDFs that we didn’t design ourselves and don’t have CAD for. The lack of the “_stp” etc in the filename helps everyone involved know if we have 3D CAD data available.
A little late to the discussion, but I was responsible for implementing MBD at my last company. It is no small feat, and as noted by Josh and others it is not the best way to provide visual information to the machinists to look at. It IS useful at providing the information to downstream tools that read the data directly. If a tool can import the model correctly then those tolerance blocks can be automatically applied to surfaces. This can be STEP 242, but that standard does not work well or even better something like QIF (QIF Tutorials). QIF tools will cost additional $$, so I am not promoting this for a small shop doing this on their own. QIF is most useful when you want to provide the results directly to an end customer who wants it in that format. For us, that was big aerospace customers.
If you want to generate something useful for the shop, what I recommend is the Solidworks MBD package so you can generate 3D PDFs. Then the machinists will need to have a computer screen at their machine. This will act like a traditional 2D piece of paper but gives you the benefit of being able to rotate the model, zoom in to confirm exactly where that line is pointing to. It also enables full color definition for references. If you click on a tolerance block, all the surfaces it controls will turn orange. It can remove ambiguity. It can be more clunky to markup and requires some computer literacy for the users. Really, though, it is pretty basic if you spend the time to make your 3D PDF templates easy to use.
The end result, then, is that the shop gets at least two files. The machine-readable file (STEP, QIF, native Solidworks, etc), and the human readable file (3D PDF, native Solidworks, eDrawings, etc).