For work I frequently have to create parametrically-driven models and assemblies with many variants available. It's reasonably painless to generate almost everything using toolbox additions. So good, so far. The only big hurdle I've hit so far is with labelling- these are 3D printed parts that need to have labels and titles embossed or wrapped onto a model, with each variant needing its own slightly-different text. Think making a family of radius gages, with every gage featuring a radius identifier. Sometimes the variants will be longer alphanumeric sequences. Is there any way I can control the text input at this level? Doesn't have to be excel-driven, any method suitable to batch-generation of part families would be great. I might have overlooked something, I don't know.
Currently the least painful way I know of is to generate a sketch + extrude operation for each variant, manually editing a single number for each one, and then suppressing everything except the correct label-adding feature. This is fine for a half-dozen parts, but I have a project that will need maybe 60 variants, and creating the text features is going to take 10 times longer than the rest of the process combined. It's especially frustrating because absolutely nothing about the variant sketches will differ except for one or two characters being altered- same font, same size, same everything except a 23 gets changed to a 24. Creating said sketches as catalog items can save a little bit of time, but the specifics of the labels differ between part families, so I generally can't reuse them between projects, like in this case.
One other very crufty workaround I haven't tried yet is drawing digits by creating a sixteen-segment display alphanumeric part, with each segment a separate extrusion, and then defining an alphanumeric 'part library' by suppressing or unsuppressing the various segments, so I can choose each character from a drop-down menu. Technically viable and faster to populate large part families with than the above slow method, but you're giving up on using proper fonts with good readability, and text of any length will make assemblies hideously bloated and slow to work with, so I'd rather not implement this if possible.
Currently the least painful way I know of is to generate a sketch + extrude operation for each variant, manually editing a single number for each one, and then suppressing everything except the correct label-adding feature. This is fine for a half-dozen parts, but I have a project that will need maybe 60 variants, and creating the text features is going to take 10 times longer than the rest of the process combined. It's especially frustrating because absolutely nothing about the variant sketches will differ except for one or two characters being altered- same font, same size, same everything except a 23 gets changed to a 24. Creating said sketches as catalog items can save a little bit of time, but the specifics of the labels differ between part families, so I generally can't reuse them between projects, like in this case.
One other very crufty workaround I haven't tried yet is drawing digits by creating a sixteen-segment display alphanumeric part, with each segment a separate extrusion, and then defining an alphanumeric 'part library' by suppressing or unsuppressing the various segments, so I can choose each character from a drop-down menu. Technically viable and faster to populate large part families with than the above slow method, but you're giving up on using proper fonts with good readability, and text of any length will make assemblies hideously bloated and slow to work with, so I'd rather not implement this if possible.
