Balloon to face

[pchandrasekaran]

Hi There,

Currently when ballooning the leader/arrow head could only attach it to a edge. But in other competitor products there is the ability to attach it to a face.

The only way to achieve this now is to select an edge and then dragging the arrow head to the middle.

The problems with this method is 

1. It is an extra step

2. The link is lost to the balloon after the arrowhead is dragged

I believe this is a critical feature, when parts share an edge its difficult for someone reading the drawing to figure out which item it is pointing to

[Anonymous]

When clicking parts in a view on a drawing with balloon command, it won't allow me to click a part surface, only part edges.

This is problematic when several parts are welded together, it can sometimes be troublesome to actualy find an edge of one of the parts in the assembly in the current view. Causing me so have to make another opposate view outside the sheet to make the ballon and drage it over to the view I want it in. Also have to manually cange the arrow to a dot.

Other times, the arrow is just unclear to production people as to what part is actually being pointed to in the view, especially when multiple ballons are near eachother seeminly all pointing to the same area. Again I'll drag the balloon leader and change arrow to dot.

If Inventor knows what part in view I am clicking when clicking an edge and places correct item # from parts list in the current balloon, why can't Inventor do just the same when clicking a surface? Why not automaticly use dots when its a surface?

[jingyi.liu]

Hi 

Thanks for your feedback, I think your request is similar to below one, please cast your vote if you think so.

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/inventor-ideas/balloon-should-allow-me-to-click-surface/idi-p/5280891

Regards,

Jingyi

[jeanB99VC]

When I want to balloon a part on a drawing I am forced by inventor to connect it to an edge.

I can't (or don't know how) to attach the ballonarrow (or point) to a face of the part retaining the part reference.

At this moment when moving the arrow to the face of the part the connection with that part is lost.

In comperrisson with Solidworks, Solidworks has the possibility to make a choice if you want to balloon to the edges or faces of a part. Even afterworths you can change the balloonarrows indipendently retaingin the part-reference.

[jtylerbc]

This would be very helpful for plate-steel and sheet metal fabrication.  In some cases, you end up with parts that have no edges that aren't shared with another part.  This makes it both difficult to balloon in the first place, and ambiguous to read after ballooning.

Currently our method is to drag the arrow off the edge, into the interior of the part.  Unfortunately, while this does maintain BOM association, it doesn't retain geometric association, so the arrows tend to "wander" if the part moves within the assembly.  The ability to tie a balloon arrow relative to a face would help quite a bit with this scenario.

[leowarren34]

Would definitely make things far clearer and obvious 

+1

[rhenstenburg]

I balloon in this manner quite frequently.  Trick is to balloon to an edge FIRST.  After creating the balloon, drag the pointer to wherever you want.  The pointer will change to a circle (desirable for me), will retain the proper item number and will be attached to the view (in case you want to move the view, the balloon will move also).

[rhenstenburg]

I didn't read @jtylerbc 's response carefully.  He makes valid points.  The balloon in my suggestion will be tied to the view but it is no longer tied to the part.  If the part moves within the ass'y, the balloon may no longer point to it.  I will now add my vote.  Good suggestion.

[jtylerbc]

@rhenstenburg, what you describe is exactly what I do as well.  As you mentioned in your second message, the problem is that the balloon's arrow isn't actually tied to anything.  So while the balloon's data (item, part number, whatever) is associative, the balloon's location is just relative to the view, and may end up "drifting" away from the part if the part's position changes.

Occasionally we run into an issue where the part is difficult to select for ballooning in the first place, due to the fact that all of its edges are shared with another part.  That's an infrequent problem for us though - more often the problem is that a detached balloon ends up pointing at the wrong spot because something was moved or changed size.

[dan_inv09]

It would be impossible to do for a large fabrication and I don't know how it would work in a assembly, but I recently had a leader text attached to a cylindrical part and edited the view to rotate it from "front" to "top" and the leader seemed to be pointing to where the edge had been, i.e. right in the middle.

(here the arrows are dots when pointing not at an edge - my personal preference was a squiggle, but I also liked the oblique line)

[AlexZW28B]

This fix needs to happen! It is super frustrating not being able to apply balloons to part surface. I agree, that with the current implementation, the balloons create a lot of unnecessary extra work/wasted time, and also is archaic compared to other CAD packages. It has been a number of years since this had been identified... what happened AUTODESK?

[SER4]

Similar/same/duplicate idea:

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/inventor-ideas/balloon-to-face/idi-p/7863515

[TheBeardedEngineer]

2021 and this is still an issue. I just dont have any words for how bad it is that such simple functionality is not included in a program that has quite a reputation in the industry. When your part is covered on the edge by some other part, you just cant attach a balloon to it. There is no way to get the info on the drawing. Inventor should help in making it easier to set up a clear drawing, not harder. Comming from SW I keep being surprised how much of these basic things are missing here...

[mgerkenENXYL]

I agree wholeheartedly that this is basic and should be standard functionality.

[gregory_nickol]

As others mentioned, this would very much help with clarity when there are ambiguous edges, which occur on just about every drawing I detail, leading to extra otherwise unnecessary views just to put a balloon that won't lose it's position.

I'm not sure how exactly the tracking works for balloons currently to update location on geometry updates, maybe there is no simple way to track a face as compared to an edge within the core functionality of Inventor. However, maybe we could at least have it where if we click on a face for placement, we then have to pick one (or more) of it's edges to use for tracking purposes that it would remain in position relative to on geometry updates?

[rhenstenburg]

I feel passionate about this and reading the recent post from @gregory_nickol  made me think about it again (blending his thought into two distinct suggestions and adding my own thoughts).

I see two possible solutions (not currently implemented):

1) Balloon to an edge first (not always easy as pointed out by others). Possible solution, similar to constraints, right click > Select Other ... then cycle through to the correct item (the highlighting the parts/ass'ys while cycling will help with the selection of the required item). Next, whenever a balloon pointer is dragged off an edge, it should remain positioned relative to the edge where it was first attached (not its position within the view).  This will not work under rotations of the part within the view, but it should track a translation.

2) As considered by @gregory_nickol, click on a part face directly in the drawing and have the balloon attach to that location.  I agree that this may be more difficult to implement but the view has its underlying 3D model so it should be straightforward to determine the part & face.  The pointer position to retain would be its relative position with respect to the part (maybe its centroid which would be less affected by geometry modifications than choosing the 0th line or vertex and better than the part's origin which could be off the part).  Highlighting of the part (similar to when hovering over an edge) would definitely be useful.

[JBerns]

Community,

Would someone verify that Solidworks can balloon a face/surface?

It looks like it can from this video:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=solidworks+balloon+video&t=newext&atb=v377-1&iax=videos&ia=videos&iai=http... 

Regards,

Jerry

[JBerns]

Community,

Would someone verify that Solidworks can balloon a face/surface?

It looks like it can from this video:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=solidworks+balloon+video&t=newext&atb=v377-1&iax=videos&ia=videos&iai=http... 

A combined total of 168 votes - yet still considered, "Gathering Support".

Regards,

Jerry

[joranTF2QF]

@JBerns, yes in Solidworks it is just as easy to attach your balloon to the face as to the edge. If you attach it to the face, the arrow changes to a little dot.

Comming from Solidworks to Invenor, it really surprised me that this functionality is not  (yet) supported in Inventor. However, Solidworks loses a lot of relations when replacing components in an assembly,. This results in having to manually reattach a lot of arrows and dimensions. One vote from me!

Regards,

Joran

[Yijiang.Cai]

Many thanks for posting the idea, and tracked as [INVGEN-75806]

[Eugen.platonESS5G]

Hi,

I often encounter this issue as well. It would be great if there was an option to choose arrows projected to the center of gravity of the component, which would make it easier to read drawings for certain projects. I understand that it may not be a solution for every situation, but it would certainly address a significant portion of projects.

Regards,

Eugen