auto bounding box in drawing?

[bp]

Good morning all.

In my company, whenever I create a flat sheetmetal product, I'm going to have to make a drawing containing envelop dimensions to plot as PDF for reference and a second drawing with the flat-state scaled 1:1 to plot as dxf (which is used for the cam process).

Since CREO there's this great feature in the "flat pattern preview" called bounding box (when in sheetmetal mode).

This shows the envelop size of a flat sheetmetal part.

Now wouldnt it be logical if drawing mode would have the same functionality?

Everytime I create a sheetmetal drawing (PDF) I have to add these dimensions manually.

Also it would be great if I could select drawing paper size that is slightly larger than the dimensions of the bounding box so when I press the Refit button, the part fits nicely on my screen (to be plotted as dxf, so I need scale 1:1).

any comments?

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[jselland]

I'm also trying to utilize this feature. We have a relations in our sheet parts that fill in a filed on the drawing for thickness, flat length, & flat width. These are currently either manually tied to a dimension symbol or a value just entered manually. I want these to automatically be filled via bounding box dimensions.

I have found that if you create a flat pattern you get 2 feature parameters for lenth/width. ref: http://support.ptc.com/appserver/wcms/relnotes/note.jsp?&im_dbkey=135239&icg_dbkey=826

but i am having trouble getting those parameters to report, possibly because they are at the feature level instead of the part.

Also, if you click "switch dimensions" when viewing the bounding box preview you will see 2 dimension symbols pxxx and pxxx (it is buggy and hard to get them to show correctly but they're there). So I've tried using these symbols to populate my fields, but the actual number of that pxxx symbol is unpredictable (might be p122 & p123 or p627 & p628, and so on).

So, does anybody have any hints on how to put these bounding box values into a relation automatically and consistently?

thanks

[TomD.inPDX]

I'm going to suggest making some reference dimensions in the flat state and give them a reserved symbol name so you can find them easily. Even though they are reference, you can remove the reference annotation and manage their precision, along with any other annotation required.

You could create these dimensions by doing an unfold and creating a bounding sketch with associativity to the part. That sketch could be specifically created to create a geometry point feature in the lower left corner to manage the position of the DXF view on the page, so the view always grows up and right. Just add a Bend Back feature afterward if you want this within the history considering flat patterns are always last.

There are a number of ways to manage flat pattern features but I never liked them being the last feature because I want the generic to be as-used. This means the flat pattern is a "special case". How are you managing these?

Automating sheet size? Now your asking a lot You'd think this is possible.

[jselland]

That's roughly how we do it now. Far from an automatic process.

[AndyHermanson · Accepted solution]

If you look in the flat pattern feature, you can see there are parameters in that feature. they should be like below.

You can pull those parameters into notes or symbols or those types of things.