Using Edit Feature Appearance in PC-DMIS

Published by CMMXYZ on March 1, 2023

Clean up your Graphics Window quickly and easily by using Edit Feature Appearance. This tool lets you show/hide which features and labels will appear on your CAD model.

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In this video, I just wanted to show you a real simple trick on how to clean up the appearance of your graphics screen. So, as you can see here, I've got a number of features, a number of labels kind of cluttered all over the screen. If you right-click anywhere on the screen, you can hide the IDs, all of them, Hide All IDs. But then we still have the feature symbols like you can see in the center there that it's a bit of a mess, a bunch of plain symbols. So, I can show all IDs again, or I could actually hide all features. So, if I hide all features, it cleans it up nicely.

So, now the question is, how do we get them back? And that's what I wanted to show you today. I often show this trick in my classes because it's not in the curriculum. I'm surprised most people and most programmers don't know this. It's under Edits, Graphic Display Window, and something called Feature Appearance. This is a little trick that I find useful. What this is, is a list of all the features, I have them sorted by type, you can sort by program if you want, that's the order they would appear in the program.

For me, in this demo, I just want to sort by type because I want to highlight a few feature types, like a scan, for example. If I select the scan, I now have the option to turn the label on, or the display or both. The display is the symbol of the feature, the label is the label. I can also change the color at this point. I can make those scan features have a color of orange in the label anyway, so I'll hit Apply, and see what that looks like. I can clear the list and I can do the same for other scan types, maybe these two on the bottom HA 1 and HA 2. For those ones, I can make a green background. So, label on, display on, and Apply. And you can see them now.

A nice way to clean up the CAD and just control what you can see and not see, I can't tell you how many times I've opened a PC-DMIS program and the labels and features are just all over the place. It's just really hard to focus on problems in specific areas.

We'll click OK to that. The final trick I'll show you here is automatic label positioning. If you right-click a Label, you can just go down to the bottom up this context menu and just choose Automatic Label Position. That's a nice clean layout. Great to use this for a snapshot. Remember, a snapshot is this camera button. Just press that, give it a name if you wish, and press OK. Now that would appear on your inspection report. So, without all of the extra clutter and distractions of those feature symbols.

If you haven't already, head on over to our website and check out the training section of our website. And in that section, you can find a calendar showing all the courses we offer and when we offer them. Okay, so that's about it for this tip. Just a simple one, but a useful one. I hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining me, and we'll see you next time.

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