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This suggestion primarily revolves around the inability to place user defined parts bubbles, but extends out to the lack of a real weldment feature.
If one were able to place a user defined bubble - where the number gets added to the bottom of the smart table - one could have a lot more control and flexibility in the drawing.
This would also open up another really powerful tool - being able to use created bodies to build weldments.
As an example let's say I want to draw up a simple welded T- shaped bracket. The fastest and easiest way to do this is with a single sketch, and two extruded bodies like below.
By only working in bodies for a simple object like this the simplicity is perfect.
- I don't need to go through the added steps of creating components.
- There aren't any joints to bother with - again fewer steps.
- The whole component in this case can be adjusted very easily.
- I can set materials of each body individually if I really wanted.
- The bodies can even be moved and copied, which isn't the best practice for drawing but is simple and effective - no capture position is required.
Unfortunately I can't create a drawing and BOM this way, see below. There's no way to manually add bubbles of your choosing.
The proper way to do this obviously would be to create components of each plate, and then apply joints.
Problem is joints take added time to assemble, this gets REALLY time consuming when there are lots of parts. There also isn't any benefit of using components unless that component is something to be reused elsewhere in the drawing. If your part is a piece of structural steel, plate, wood component or any variety of simple shape that is cut to fit there really isn't much benefit to using components. Creating bodies is the most simple and straight forward path.
Additionally, your documentation is often limited to a cut list or a reference to a DXF file, and again using components offers no benefit for these either.
I used this bracket as a simple example, but the benefits of only using bodies goes up with the complexity of the weldment. I end up working with a lot of welded steel frames, and creating new components for each tube, angle, and plate is VERY cumbersome and time consuming. Depending on how you places your joints can make changes to these simple objects unnecessarily time consuming. Take this weldment of a basic frame fabricated out of angle iron.
Notice how items 1 & 2, and 3 & 4 are identical cut lengths but have a different item number. This is due to the whole drilled in them, I can't have asymmetric hole patterns in the parts even though for the fabricator it doesn't matter. These holes would be drilled AFTER the frame is welded together. Using bodies instead of components here would have been much easier and less time consuming.
Without structural shapes all my frames were created from sketches anyway, inserting components adds additional steps and is in some ways less flexible to changes.
And that nice BOM that I have? Everything was created using manual processes except for the qty, and material. I had to add the part number, description, length and notes in the model or a separate table to create what is shown there. (Note that quantities in the above drawing were doubled due to two assemblies required).
A purely manual user defined table and item balloons would actually have been much less work than trying to create the workarounds and tricks that I used to create the BOM shown.
So that's my suggestion - allow for user defined balloons, and it can open up workflows for user's to create simple weldments out of bodies that will make life much easier.
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