I have spent the last couple of weeks making exploded drawings. It is not one of my favorite tasks in SW.
Does anyone have any tricks for using “auto balloon?”
My list of complaints:
Sometimes it balloons all parts, sometimes it balloons some parts, and sometimes it balloons nothing at all.
It seems to have no understanding of what is on the sheet, placing the balloons on the border, on top of tables, even off of the sheet.
The arrow always land on the middle of the part, instead of pointing at an edge.
I feel like I spend just as much time modifying the auto balloon as I would adding the balloons manually.
Autoballoon only finding one part.
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Auto balloon putting balloons everywhere.
Arrow landing in the middle of the part.
I think I ran into something like that. If you are using exploded views you have to use the standard ISO view. If you choose another rotated view, then SW can’t find parts like that.
I recall this from a couple of years ago (version 2019SP4) we could manually balloon them in exploded view, but the balloon wants to attach to where the part would be in iso view, you have to go hunting for it and watch the mouse cursor change. I cannot remember what work around we succumb to. I mean, who actually balloons parts in exploded views, why would anyone need that to be fully functional?
I don’t know that anyone where I work uses auto balloon, not worthwhile, one of those features, it’s just marketing crap IMO.
My VAR said the best thing to do is to plan from the start to use the standard ISO view.
A work around that comes to mind may be to create a new assembly, throw the assembly you want to explode into the new ASM, rotate it how you want, to line up with the ASM standard ISO. Then explode it…Dirty, but should work.
This is where our VAR took the opportunity to hock Composer. I feel that SW’s ability to make drawings for assembly or service instructions is analogous to 1/2 length crayons with teeth marks. We bought a couple seats of Composer.
I always create a view in the assembly to be used in the exploded drawing. I can always get it to work, but sometimes it takes a little fiddling. I’m not sure what made it happy in this instance. Rebuild, switch to assembly, rebuild, open different drawing, go back to original and now it works.
I think I get composer with my seat of premium. I need to look into that.
I gave up on auto balloon after trying it a few times and having to move them all around anyways. I find it’s pretty fast to use the regular balloon feature and just put them where I want to start with. You can use the align tools to line them up if you need.
The quality of the description of the SPR they added is abysmal. Basically obstructed parts might (!) get called out or they might not. This varies depending on the view & on the selected model display (hidden lines visible, wireframe or not) & on the amount of balloons it has to create. In short:
Doesn’t work if something is obstructed!
I remember some people having problems with ballooning when they had their views in “Shaded with Edges” mode. Did you try switching it to “Hidden Lines Removed” mode and trying again?
Tried all of this in my case - STILL does not work properly all the time. There is sadly no way to force it. So you’re always left with double checking if all are called out.
I am aware (Thank you AlexLachance , I think) but usually I use the free timesavers add on from cadbooster for this (only works with one BOM though!):
Very nice, GREAT SUCCESS!
Thank you!. When working on these drawings I would from time to time see an extra column to the left in the BOM. At the time I was too focused on getting my work done, and later forget about it. Now I know what was happening.
