Simplified Reps and Auto Ballooning

[MartinPlayer]

Hi,

Creo 11.0.4.

We use Auto Ballooning to some degree but I am 'new' to their usage. I am a bit sceptical regarding them and many shortfalls seem to be fired at me that is 'putting me off'. One of the main aspects is not being able to use Auto Balloons with Simplified Rep Views in a drawing. I have been using Simplified Reps extensively over many years and ballooning using a basic symbology method. Simplified Reps has been a standard basic functionality tool within Creo for many years and I find it difficult to accept that PTC have not enabled Auto Ballooning to be possible in conjunction with Simplified Reps in a drawing. IS THIS STILL TRUE???

[Chris3]

Yes it is true. At last years PTC/User meeting the product manager asked if it would be helpful if they fixed it so they are thinking about putting it in a future release.

A work around is to not use reps and to use layers instead. Using layers is actually better for large assembly performance management.

[StephenW]

@Chris3  Can you explain how using layers is better for large assembly performance management? I'll admit, I've never tried it based on the fact that layer control will still load all the models in memory. But I am always open to new concepts.

[Chris3]

To be honest I haven't done a lot of this myself. At the last PTC/User meeting (2025) Matt Burr from CAT had some internal performance numbers comparing the two.

The reason it is better from a performance management standpoint is because every time a new rep is retrieved, Creo has to go back to the Master Assembly to get the instructions for that rep. It does this for each rep. So if you have 6 simp reps for instance, then it goes back to the master rep 6 times for those instructions. Its not opening the full mast rep, but there is processing time associated with getting the instructions for each rep.

[StephenW]

@Chris3 

Thanks for the tip. 

Seems a little counter-intuitive but the amount of time spent waiting is definitely worth a couple of trial runs to get my real world numbers.