Hi,
When I place an annotation on a drawing, the leader draws to the middle of the annotation.
Is it possible to have the annotations behave like normal autocad leaders...bottom of top line, etc
see attached for current results (even if you grip edit the leader locations, they revert back to the centre if you update your views.
Cheers
Rich.O
ECE Design has a product that assists in Annotating 3D models. It allows for multiple styles of annotations that can be controlled by an MLeader Style and you can choose which plant properties to assign to the annotation. Also when the model changes, you can sync the changes to update the annotation.
https://www.ecedesign.com/ece-software/annoworx/
Although meant well by @matt.worland, it is of course bollocks that we need a 3rd party plugin for this.....
@Rich.O.3d, such a thing is not possible as of current in Plant 3D. At some point I did manage to create proper ortho annotation leaders, by creating all kinds of LISP commandos. But unfortunately after a system crash I lost those and I really don't remember how I did all that (you'll slowly convert from an engineer to an IT guy when starting to mess with LISP)
But, as stated multiple times already in this thread, Autodesk appears to have no interest whatsoever on listening to its users... Our problem is that for smaller scale plant design, there are no proper alternatives. For instance, E3D is suited better for big projects, Vertex G4 Plant has too limited support and all other software I know of, is either too complicated to get to isometrics for instance, or it's just not suited for plant design at all..
Work around: custom ortho annotation without leader offset to sit 1/16" above a dimension leader/user preference.
Hi,
Could you please describe how you get multi segment leader?
Regards,
Sandeep
We switched to Orthogen OrthoGen | AutoCAD Plant 3D | Autodesk App Store and it has been ok. It's nice to be able to hit two buttons and update a same revision ortho/ga/plan/etc including all the annotation and it's near perfect. It does have it's downsides though, it doesn't bother with anything related to revisioning, it'll just update all of the annotations, no clouding. The big one that we've been asking for is the ability for it to annotate equipment nozzles, as far as I know it still does not.
This app looks as if it can save up for layout drawing time. I wonder however, if this works with more complex drawings. The video on the appstore only shows some examples of rather simple pipe rack drawings. @George.Endrulat, what's your experience with OrthoGen when it comes to more complicated drawings?
@m.bevers We've been using it successfully on projects with >30k linear feet of pipe. We use it on Equipment arrangements (w/ dims), GAs (no dims), Piping orthographics, etc.
Now don't get me wrong, it's not perfect for anything and there will be a clean up step involved. As an example for our piping orthographics we pull out all line numbers outside of the matchline and it does an OK job, but sometimes it will miss a line or the annotations will be too close together.
And as I stated before, it doesn't care about revisions. What we do is take the old rev pdf and insert it under everything in paperspace. Run the orthogen step, do the cleanup, and now we can toggle on and off the old rev pdf and it shows us exactly what changed so we can cloud and rev it. It's a pain, but not as bad as you think.
If you want it to base all other dimensions off a specific dimension, example being top of steel in an elevation view of a modular skid where all other elevations reference off that TOS, it's going to take a good bit of setup work, if it's even possible.
Where it fails for us is singular equipment drawings to send out to a vendor/fab shop to indicate our preferred nozzle arrangements. I believe it's a limitation of Plant 3D to be honest, there's no way to 'smart' annotate nozzles. We've been asking for this since 2011-ish along with wall thickness of equipment. It's been long enough now that I don't expect to ever get them.
I can't stress this enough: Orthogen does not replace a checking step.
By the way, if you were wondering, I have no affiliation with Orthogen aside from being a user at a company who purchased licenses.
Thanks @George.Endrulat
I'll go and give the trial version a go, have our IT department sent them a pricing inquiry and see where that takes us
This issue is growing a very long beard now.
But at least some Autodesk employees assured us they will pass the matter on to implement the fixes in one of the next versions of Plant3D... 12 years ago.
I would love to know how many dedicated programmers Autodesk has for Plant 3D. I would bet they have zero dedicated to P3D 100%. It's frustrating that so many simple improvements could make this program so much better but they will not dedicate any people to "fixing" their program. They know we will still buy it and they have no incentive to "fix" it.