PMI Panel

The PMI panel is the view tree: one row per PMI view in the document's pmi block, with that view's annotations as its children. It is a dock tab titled PMI, shown in the PMI and All workbenches.

The block it shows is the OPEN document's. After a STEP assembly import that means the annotations the file made about the assembly — the ones it pinned to a particular instance, and its free notes; an annotation the file made about a PART lives in that part's own document, counted in the BOM's PMI column and shown here once you open the part.

Header

• Capture view — snapshots the current camera, the hidden objects and the wireframe setting into a new view (View N) and activates it. Ids share one counter with annotations (VIEW1, NOTE2, VIEW3, …) and are never reused.
• + Add annotation — the ten annotation types. Enabled only while a view is active; the new annotation joins the active view and its dialog opens. Reference fields are then filled through the viewport picker.
• Text size — the active view's label size in points (1–288, default 12). Chips in the viewport and the text in an exported STEP file scale with it.
• The summary N views | M annotations | active: <name>. While no view is active it ends | no active view. Nothing else comes and goes with the active view, so the tree below keeps its place when a view is activated or deactivated.

Rows

Clicking a view row selects it: the row is highlighted, and the view is not activated — the camera, visibility and wireframe stay as they are. Double-clicking a view row activates it and opens its dialog; the On tick and Activate view in its menu activate it without opening anything. Clicking an annotation row selects it: the row is highlighted, the annotation's view is activated if it was not, and its label in the viewport is drawn with a heavier outline. Double-clicking an annotation row opens its dialog. Hovering an annotation row highlights the geometry it references in the viewport. The [+]/[-] box on a view row collapses its annotations.

The view dialog

Double-clicking a view row, or Edit view in its menu, replaces the tree with the view's dialog and activates the view. It edits the view live:

• Name — the view's name, as the tree shows it. (A sheet's + Place view menu lists views by id.)
• Text size (pt) — the same setting as the header's Text size (1–288 pt).
• Wireframe — whether the view shows the model in wireframe.
• Update camera from the viewport — re-capture the camera from what is on screen now.
• Hide the selected bodies in this view — add a Hide body step for the selected solids or components (the row menu's Hide selected does the same). What a view hides is tracked as these steps, each its own row in the tree, like an explode step: edit the step's targets, untick it, delete it or undo it and the view shows the parts again.

A run of edits to one view is one undo step. Return to tree closes the dialog.

The annotation dialog

Opening an annotation replaces the tree with its dialog, laid out like a feature dialog. The banner shows the resolved text (green) or the error (red). Editing is live — every change re-resolves the annotation against the model — and Return to tree closes the form. Reference fields (Targets, Target, Anchor) are picked in place: Select focuses the field, clicks on faces, edges or vertices in the viewport land in it, a single field is done on its pick and a list on Done. On a phone or a narrow window the whole interface steps aside while a field picks, and a bar over the full-screen view lists the picks with Finish and Cancel (Picking references). The Annotation plane field is one of them: pick a planar face or a reference plane and the annotation lies in that plane (its label projects onto it and drags stay in it); leave it empty to align the annotation to the view camera.

In the viewport, clicking an annotation's label chip selects it, as clicking its row does; double-clicking a chip opens this dialog; dragging it moves the label (one undo step per drag); right-clicking it selects the annotation and opens its row's menu; Escape closes the menu and keeps the annotation selected. Chips stay inside the 3D view, never over the panes beside it, and a label wider than about half the view (a long note) is cut short with …; hover the chip for the whole text. With an annotation selected, Delete removes it, as its menu's Delete annotation does (one undo step). A view is never deleted by the key: it takes its annotations with it, so it stays behind its menu's Delete view.

Every edit is undoable and re-runs the history, so annotations re-resolve against the model.

Explosions, hidden parts, balloons and sections

A Hide body step keeps its solids or components out of the view while the view is active, the way an Explode body step moves them: add one with Hide selected on the view's row menu (or the view dialog's button, or the + menu and the Hide body toolbar button, which seed its Targets from the selection), edit its targets in its form, untick it to show the parts again, delete it or undo it. It draws nothing — no chip in the 3D view, no text or line on a sheet — and the sheets, the 3D PDF and the instructions pictures leave its parts out exactly as the viewport does. A component target hides every part under it, nested placements included. The objects hidden when the view was captured stay hidden as the view's baseline; the steps add to it.

Open an Explode body annotation, select its solids or components, and edit its shared Transform controls or drag the viewport's move/rotate gizmo. An explode step draws no label in the 3D view: its name is its row in the PMI tree and the Assembly workbench's step list. While the annotation's form is open the step is being edited and the gizmo stands on the parts it moves; Return to tree drops it. The gizmo is there from the first pick: while the targets picker holds a part, before its Done, the gizmo stands on it and a drag already sets the step's position; Done commits the targets and keeps the position. With nothing picked yet there is no gizmo. The displayed mesh, edges and pickable vertices move together. Each drag is one undo step; deactivating the view restores the modeling geometry. While an exploded view plays (Explode, Collapse or the progress slider in the Assembly workbench), each step's gizmo, and every balloon on a moving part, travel with the part. Dragging a balloon part-way stores it where the fully exploded view puts it. Dragging a step's gizmo part-way shows that step at full, so its parts stay under the gizmo. The Assembly workbench's step list names the parts each step moves (plate (ACOMP2)).

Add a Find-number balloon and select a component or its geometry. The bubble reads that occurrence's Find Number from the BOM, including leading zeros, and updates when that number changes. Set the Find Number in the BOM first. Drag the bubble to position it; its leader follows an exploded component. Balloons also appear when the PMI view is placed on a drawing sheet.

The arrow head lands on the part as the view shows it. By default it is the point of the occurrence's surface nearest the bubble in screen space, and it moves along the surface as you drag the bubble or change the camera — it never floats in the air or sits inside the body. On an exploded component it follows the displayed position through every explode annotation that moves it, and a part with several bodies takes the arrow on whichever body is nearest where that body is shown. In a sectioned view the arrow lands only on the kept half — on the cut rim when the nearest point was removed. A balloon whose component is hidden in the view, or entirely cut away by the section, or whose anchor is on a hidden or removed element, shows a red chip beside the part and no arrow; show the component (or move the section) to get the arrow back. Hiding a body in the viewport while a view is active withholds its balloon's arrow at once; a Hide body step on the view makes that permanent. To choose where the arrow points, use the Arrow anchor field: Select, then click a vertex or an edge of that component in the viewport and Finish. A vertex anchor puts the head exactly there; an edge anchor keeps the head on that edge, at the point nearest the bubble. The anchor is stored by the element's name, so it survives regeneration, and it is exported with the balloon when the view is placed on a sheet. Click the anchor's to return to the nearest-surface default. The pick and the clear are each one undo step.

A balloon can also name a placement inside a sub-assembly in its Occurrence field (ACOMP1:ACOMP3). It then shows the Find Number that the sub-assembly gives the placement, and its arrow lands on that placement only. The target must be that placement or its geometry. Manufacturing instructions use this to balloon each part where an instructions document places a whole assembly.

In Edit view, enable Section view. Choose View (the captured camera's view direction) or X/Y/Z, set Section offset (mm) from the captured camera target, and use Reverse section to change the retained side. The plane is anchored when you set it: the camera target (and, for View, its direction) at the moment you turn the section on or choose its normal. Update camera re-frames the view without moving the cut; to move the cut, change the offset. A section saved before this keeps the plane its old camera gave it.

To cut on the model's own geometry, choose Plane and use Section plane: Select, then click a planar face, a datum plane or a sketch plane (on a phone, the pick bar does this). Picking a face also turns on the section with the Plane normal. The section cuts in that plane, and Section offset moves the cut along the face's outward normal; the kept side is the side the normal points to, and Reverse section keeps the other side. The view stores the face by its name, so the cut follows the face when the model changes. If that face no longer exists or is not planar, nothing is cut and the view's form says why. The same plane is used on a sheet. While the section is on, Not cut lists the solids or components the cut leaves whole, such as shafts, pins and fasteners: pick them through the field (on a phone, the pick bar) and press Done. Picking a component keeps all of its solids whole. Annotations and balloons attached to an uncut part are drawn wherever they lie. Placed on a sheet, the view draws them uncut too: no cut edges or hatch, and on the removed side of the plane they are still drawn. Half section adds a second plane (X, Y, Z or View) through the section's origin, with its own offset and Reverse half section. Material is removed only where both planes remove it, so the view cuts a quarter away and caps both cut faces. Set it back to None to return to one plane. The MCP pmi_set_view_section takes a list of further planes (planes), so three planes cut a corner away. On a sheet a half section is drawn as one: looking along the first plane, the second is a line across the view, hatched on the side it removes and drawn whole on the other. A sheet draws two planes only when they are perpendicular; any other set puts an error on the placement. A 3D PDF cuts the view's first plane only, since a PDF section cannot keep what either plane keeps. The 3D display shows the cut with capped faces, drawn in a warm red section colour so the cut stands out from the model's faces; placing this saved view on a sheet uses the section projection and hatching. The section belongs to its view: while it is active, the other views placed on a sheet, and the 3D PDF, still show the parts it cuts away. Each other view on the same sheet that sees the cutting plane edge-on draws it as a cutting line across the view, with the section's letter and arrows pointing the way the section looks (a half section's line is its first plane's). Clicking the cut selects the part that was cut, not a face (the cut is not a face of the model, so it cannot be used as a reference). A dimension, leader, hole callout, datum or feature control frame attached to geometry the section removes is not drawn floating over the cut: it shows a red chip at its label saying the section removes it. Move the section, reverse it, or attach the annotation to the kept half. (Balloons do the same, above. In a view that also explodes parts, only balloons are checked.) The settings persist with the view, and deactivating it restores the full model.