Mirroring components within assembly should be the same for new components and reused components

[JGinden]

1. Describe your environment: What is your industry? What is your role in your organization? Describe your stakeholders.

Industry - High End Electronics

Role - CAD Admin

Stakeholders - Engineering, downstream teams, vendors, etc.

2. What version of Creo Parametric are you currently running?
8.0.6.0

3. Describe the problem you are trying to solve. Please include detailed documentation such as screenshots, images or video.

Refer to PTC support Case 16488968

See support article: https://www.ptc.com/en/support/article/CS367324?source=Case%20Viewer

Creating a mirror assembly should be the same for a new model as it is for reusing selected model.  When using the reference the mirror comes out completely different. See below screenshots for example.

4. What is the use case for your organization?
Sometimes there is a place that we want to place a component around, it would be helpful to be able to assemble one component and then mirror that component without having to create unnecessary components in our assemblies.

5. What business value would your suggestion represent for your organization?
Speed up assembling time in Creo with large assemblies.

[olivierlp]

Thank you for your idea, @JGinden. Based on the information you provided, we are acknowledging it as the Community management team. This is not a commitment from the Product team. Other users may comment and vote your idea up.

[S_Edgenear]

Analyzing the image, and from logic, it seems that when reusing a component, only it's locattion origin is mirrored. In this case, it's like making a translation to a new location whose center coordsys or origin is mirrored across the mirror plane. In this case, the current algorithm places the a new instance of the original component at the mirrored origin, but the algorithm keeps the same orientation as the original component orientation. I don't know if the algorithm can be improved to automatically rotate the component around 180º around one axis to place the "mirrored" component with the right orientation. Probably there would have to be made some input to specify around which axis the user would want the part to rotate 180º to better reflect the orientation intended, since using a pre-defined axis, X, Y, Z, might not give the user the expected results. Some parts probably would have to be rotated around an arbitrary axis, if they are not modeled orientated to one of the 3 default planes. I understand the frustration of the original poster, and really would like PTC to check weather the algorithm could be improved, but I'm afraid it isn't feasible (without user intervention and tunning during the process).

Related to this issue, one thing that might (partially) help to solve this problem, iif the original part is assembled to a Sketched Coordsys, is for the Mirror entity inside the Sketcher to allow the user to "Mirror" CSYS. Currently it's not possible to Mirror a CSYS inside a sketch. We can "simulate" a mirrored CSYS by Mirroring a Point and trying to geometically make the angles of the X or Y axis of the CSYS to be the same value around the mirroring "line". But this workaround is tedious and time consuming for each CSYS that the user might want to have a mirrord copy to place components around. Since the objective is to have CSYS to place the "mirrored" original component, only it's location needs to be mirrored, but when using in the context of a 2D sketch with CSYS to place all the components, if the sketch feature is improved to allow "mirrored" CSYS, we could very easily and very fast create partterens of several "left sided" and "right sided" components (ie, the same compnent to be patterened in all CSYS locations, but in the originals CSYS in the locations specified, and in the Mirrored CSYS, the same component would be patterned using the mirrored origina, but rotated in the Z axis with an angle that would be automatically calculated. For instance, if the original CSYS has the X Axis with 0º, the miroed CSYS X axis would point to 180º. In another instance, if the original CSYS X axis was "tilted" 30º around the reference mirror plane, the Mirrored CSYS X axis would be "tilted" 180º - 30º. The Y axis of the "Mirored" CSYS would always be perpendicular to the X axis. This would guarantee a quick and easy method to pattern AND placement MIRROR components,