- [Instructor] Another great set of features
inside of SOLIDWORKS drawings
are the balloon and auto balloon features.
With these features, you can create balloons
in a drawing document or in a note.
These balloons label the parts and assembly
and relate them to item numbers in a bill of materials.
Let's take a look at how this features work together.
If we go up to the top of our Command Manager,
we see in the Annotation tab the balloon feature
and just like so many other features inside of SOLIDWORKS,
if we hover over it, it does give us a description
of how the feature works.
I'm going to go ahead and click on it
and it's going to open the feature in the Property Manager
on the left.
We'll notice right away as we go over
to our drawing area
that we do see a preview of what the balloon will look like.
So we see a circular balloon
with two characters and it also has a quantity listing
to the right of it,
which is denoted right here by the placement.
And a times markers, an X marker.
So you can see times like this or places,
kind of change that around.
But you can see here there's a bunch of different options
and it's pretty cool
and if I scroll over to my part
and I want to start labeling or dropping balloons,
I just hover over an item
and you'll see that it switches between an arrow
and a dot.
The arrow signifies that you've picked up an edge
of one of the items that you're selecting.
If you have a dot, that means it's selecting that face.
So that just helps you know
what part or item you're actually selecting with each click.
So I'm going to go ahead and left mouse button click
to place the point
and now I'm going to drag my balloon out
where I'd like to place that.
I'm going to click on more time.
And now I get my item number
that relates back to the bill of materials
and then how many times it occurs,
so that's one X.
I'm going to just going to bounce around
and do that a couple more times
for a few more items.
Now, say that I want to change the way
that they're labeled inside of the balloons.
I can go to the settings here
and change it from a circular balloon to a triangle.
Start dropping triangles down.
I can change the number of characters.
So I can do a tight fit.
So we'll select the same one and just compare them.
You can see the tight fit versus the regular fit.
Or the number of characters.
You can also do user defined,
which is kind of random.
But depending on how many numbers you have inside of there,
you can also change the position
of the quantity or you can turn that off.
I usually don't have that on
when I'm putting balloons inside of items.
I keep that off.
One other nice thing you can do
if you select one balloon
and hit Control + A,
it'll select all of your balloons.
And then if hold down that Control
and I clicked on this once to deselect it.
I'm going to click it again to reselect it.
I can go over here and change all those settings at once.
So I can change everything to circular.
A tight fit.
So two characters actually.
I like what two characters looks like.
I'm going to turn off the quantity.
And then accept that.
And now I've labeled a bunch of items.
You can see here where I didn't connect the arrow
or anything, I just dropped the balloon
and space it as a question mark
'cause it doesn't know what you're pointing it to.
So I can just select that and hit Delete
and it won't delete any of the other balloons
that I've dropped on there.
And again, if you take a look,
these link back to the items inside
of your bill of materials.
Now, I'm going to clear these out.
So I'm going to select one, hit Control + A
to select all of them
and then hit Delete on my keyboard.
Now I'm going to use the auto balloon option
and this is a pretty cool option.
I'm going to click on that.
The first thing that it prompts you to do
is select the drawing view
that you want to apply this to.
So I'm going to select this drawing view.
And I'm not going to hit Accept yet.
I want to go down and check all of these settings.
So here we have a few more options.
So we can set what numbers we're selecting.
So let's say we don't want
to include item one, two or three.
We can say okay, start at item four
and move in increments of one.
So now we've changed everything
so that it goes from four to 10,
instead of one to seven.
So not really the most helpful
but if you do have to customize your bill of materials,
this is one way that you can do it.
So I'm going to start at item one, hit Enter again.
And switch that back the way that it was.
You can lock whether or not you can change the item numbers.
You can also lock
whether or not it follows the assembly order,
which can be important depending again
on how you're labeling things inside of your assembly.
As we move down, we can also see the pattern type.
So by default, I've got it so that it puts my balloons
into a square pattern around the drawing view
but we can align them all to one side like the top
or the bottom.
We can also do the left and the right.
This can be very handy
if you're trying to keep your drawing organized
in a specific kind of way.
You can ignore multiple instances or not
so that you can get the repeated items.
Again, if you're trying to call hardware in a view,
that can be really important.
You also have the option here
to insert magnetic lines.
And in the next video,
we're going to talk about how magnetic lines work
but for now, just know that that's the line right here
that all of these balloons are snapped to.
So you can turn that off
so it doesn't include a magnetic line,
it just drops everything there
and just toggle this on and off.
I mentioned earlier that you can see
that these all have arrows on them.
That's signifying that their leader attachment
is at the edges of all these items.
Sometimes I find it clear to use the faces instead
because that way it's right on top of the item
and there's no confusion
about whether or not it's on the edge
of one item or another.
But go with whatever works for you.
Sometimes if you switch between these like you can see here,
it's dropping out a lot
and I might not get everything I want out
of the auto balloon feature.
You might have to use multiple views
in order to create all of the balloon attachments
that you need.
So I'm going to go ahead and leave this on edges,
scroll down, and now we're just back
to the same settings that we had before
for our balloons, whether we want a circular balloon,
a different shape that's available.
How many characters we want it to be.
One nice feature that's really important I think
is the balloon text.
So typically, we want to call out the item number.
So how it links to the bill of materials
but we can also show the quantity.
So how many of this item we actually use.
That can be really handy again
if you're calling out hardware on a drawing.
You can call it a specific custom property,
which then you can select from down here.
So maybe you want to know what the file name
or the description are
because you're trying to show maybe all the things
that have a certain description.
It's whatever you want to use.
All of those custom properties are available here.
You can also do the file name,
which can be handy if you're just trying to identify things
without using a bill of materials.
You can go up to the top
and turn your balloon settings to none
and then just have all of the names of the items
and have them called out.
So that can be really handy as well.
So a lot of options here in the balloon text.
But I'm going to switch mine back to the item number
and again, a circular balloon labeling.
Go ahead and click OK.
And now all of my balloons are created
for this drawing view, linking back to my bill of materials.