Changing the annotation plane within a UDF

[Chris3]

I have opened up a support ticket and PTC is still investigating but it doesn't appear that there is a way to change the annotation plane for annotations within a UDF.

Anyone doing MBD with UDFs? Are you aware of a work around for having the annotations placed on a different annotation plane? I know once it is placed you can right click on them and choose move to plane but I am hoping there is a better response.

[tbraxton]

We are not using this in the context of MBD deployment but tried to exploit it for drawing purposes. I know that MBD is intended to get rid of 2D drawings, but so far have not encountered an organization that has deployed MBD for production work.

I have seen issues with annotations displaying properly when included in UDF for a model and then presented in 2D drawing. It was all "fixable" but required manual intervention for each drawing view when placed. Our intent was to define the UDF and then drop into the model where needed and hoped that the drawing view would be "good" when we added a view and showed the annotations. Our hope was crushed by PTC when we inquired about this......

Showing UDF annotations in a view requires manual cleanup to get it to look correct on the drawing.

[Chris3]

No doubt MBD has challenges but there are organizations using it full stop. Aero structures for instance are defined by laminar flow and there isn't really another good way to make them without MBD. We are not doing MBD in the "grand vision" mentality but the great thing about UDFs if you can setup all of the sematic references and GD&T once and then reuse and they copy forward. If you are going to be creating UDFs anyways there is no reason not to try and take advantage of that functionality for the future.

[Mfridman]

Hi @Chris3 

When you said that after you placed the UDF you use right click-->move to plane, which is one possible command, but did you also considered using the Change orientation which is also available in the  right click menu?

Using this command you will be able to not only move the annotation to a plane that is parallel to the already used annotation plane in the UDF, but also to choose totally different annotations plane like TOP, FRONT, LEFT etc.? 

[Chris3]

Yes, I am aware of this, however this is not a parameter that I can add to the UDF. So the user needs to be taught how to do this and they have to click for each annotation which is not ideal.

Ideally the UDF would allow the annotation plane as a choice for the user (so all of the annotations would move to that plane) or even better, just auto re-align the annotations parallel to the annotation plane that the geometry is being placed on.

In my case, simplistically, I have a hole with some GD&T. The default dimension for the original hole is oriented to the surface that the hole is being placed on. Yet when the UDF is made the new annotations are not being placed on the surface of the new hole in the new part where the UDF is being placed. The annotations keep the orientation from the original part that the UDF was made from.