SOLIDWORKS DRAWINGS - Ballooning Exploded Views

SOLIDWORKS DRAWINGS: Ballooning Exploded Views

Assembly Drawings always contain an exploded view with the components ballooned to identify them in the Bill of Materials table. SOLIDWORKS has a great tool for automatically adding balloons to your assembly drawing view. This Auto Balloon command will make sure every component is ballooned and that no duplicate balloons are created. Another advantage of the Auto Balloon tool is that the balloon placement is neatly arranged around the view. You can specify the general layout pattern in which they will be positioned. One drawback of this Auto Balloon tool is that the balloon leader arrows may attach themselves to a location on that part that isn’t desired. You can easily reposition these leaders by just dragging the tip of the arrow. If you must do this for many of the leaders, it could require several minutes to adjust.

Manually ballooning the drawing view, and clicking each component, is the alternate method. With the use of the Magnetic Lines, it is still easy to arrange these balloons in a very clean layout. In some cases, manually ballooning the view might be the quicker method.

While manually ballooning the drawing, and selecting the components, it is possible to accidentally miss ballooning a component. There is an easy way to check if a component was missed. This is done by clicking on the Bill Of Materials table itself, and expanding the table by clicking the tab on its edge.

This will show additional information about the component, and includes a column that shows if a balloon is present. In this example, item number 10 is missing a balloon.

Hovering over the part icon in this column will also show a preview of the component to make it easy to identify. If you click on the part icon, it will highlight the component in the exploded view.

Now it is easy to go back and add the missing balloon to the drawing view.