Mirroring part with instances including drawing (how to)

Hello,

Below is a tip for those of you trying to mirror a part with family instances on the same drawing. The issue came out at an internal discussion, and was found worth sharing out – probably some of you will found it useful.

Imagine you have a part_a.prt with family table, just 2 instances : part_a_inst1.prt & part_a_inst1.prt. And you have them all put on a different views on the same drawing, same or different sheets – for whatever purpose you need it.

Now you need to Mirror this part in a way drawings will be “smartly” copied and adjusted to a new mirrored objects. It does work if you use option rename_drawings_with_object = part (or “both”) and use “similar name convention” for part and drawing -  and can potentially save you quite a time.

However, the known limitation is that upon file / mirror operation, Creo strips family table from the new mirrored part. So drawing will be copied, and generic model will be replaced in drawing with a name of mirrored object. But since other 2 instances will not be copied – drawing retrieval will be aborted (as in case of missing drawing model).

Trick proposed below can help you work this around and still have you drawing fully mirrored.

• Mirror part_a.prt “geometry with features”, with  config option rename_drawings_with_object = part / both.
• part_a.prt drawing called part_a.drw will get mirrored to part_a_mir.drw (part mirrors to part_a_mir.prt)
• Export Family Table from generic part_a.prt to .ptd file
• Delete .XPR file of original part if exists in directory (it may cause trouble upon next step)
• Open mirrored part part_a_mir.prt, create Family Table , import . ptd file. Instances names should be the same as in original generic part_a.prt.
  Dimensions have same ID if mirrored “with features” hence FT columns should work same as in original part. Ensure this by checking both instances.
• Now open mirrored Drawing. Views should be all OK. Keep drawing in session.
• Go to mirrored generic model, rename instances in FT to a part_a_mir_inst1 / part_a_mir_inst1 to have unique names.
• Save mirrored drawing. Now all views look on “unique” instances of mirrored generic.
• Now, if all goes well … your drawing has mirrored object with both mirrored instances.

In case you mirror by "geometry only" method this will also work, though resulting views will be much less meaningful - since this way of mirroring does not preserve any feature information so mostly all annotations will be lost.

Hope this will be helpful in some cases,

Regards

  Vlad