Mirroring in general is more complicated that it SHOULD be.
I have a part model that I need the opposite hand for. The most obvious way of creating this mirror model would be to go FILE/SAVE AS/MIRROR. The only problem is that you can NOT choose the plane to mirror from. WHY NOT? There is absolutely no reason this crucial step shouldn't be included.
There is a work around that involves extra un-needed steps.
This includes going into an Assembly and creating the mirror from this. Within Assembly it does allow you to specify the mirror plane.
I have followed PTC's specific directions to produce my needed mirrored part.
I specified the mirror plane from my original part (I also tried this with the Assembly mirror plane)
I am very happy with my result. See picture below (New mirror is in green)
The satisfaction fades however as I see that my model is precisely the way it mirrored before. See picture below.
After the ensuing frustration I discovered that I could rotate my part so I was able to get the correct orientation. See picture below.
When I go back into Assembly after rotating the part I see that it displays incorrect to the view visibility within the part. See below picture
Any idea as to why my Part and Assembly models do not line up?
After this experience I voted up one of the Mirror part with specified plane Idea submissions.
What worries me however is that I have a mismatch between what I can view between Part and Assembly. This could lead to extremely expensive manufacturing results.
I did modify my planes to a World View Coordinate System. My views and Csys orientations appear to agree with each other in my Part and Assembly templates. This is the 1st such anomaly I've seen.
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Hi Paul,
This is what I did and see if i understand what is happening to you. By the way, I wholeheartedly agree with you that the Creo mirror functionality has the serious limitation in that it always mirrors about the "internal" x-y plane.
Shown in the image is an assembly of three components each constrained by "default".
Starting with the light blue part: if you do a save-as mirror function to that part you will end up with the dark blue part. Note that the mirror plane is the x-y plane of the default coordinate system.
Now, suppose what you actually want is the light green part - one that's been mirrored about they y-z plane. Well, if you use the assembly method of mirroring and create the mirror component (green - MIRRORED_IN_ASM) using the x-y plane of the light blue component, you will get what you see above, which looks great except as you mentioned, the green component is actually identical to the dark blue one. Creo merely does the same "x-y" mirror and then applied the "Fix constraint" to position the new part in the right location - in this assembly. In other words, if you change the "fix" constraint to "default", the green part will end up overlapping the dark-blue one.
So to get it to the right position, I transformed the geometry of the light green component by rotating it about its y-axis by 180 degrees. This modified component is now shown in the "default" orientation and is the correct mirror of the light-blue original. Also its views are preserved, etc...
I'm attaching my test files if you want to examine this. I know that this is a simple example and the corrective transformations can be much more complicated than a simple rotate about y-axis by 180 degrees, but that's how it is. The only other thing to keep in mind is to model your "to be mirrored" parts knowing that they will be flipped about the default x-y plane.
David,
That would be nice but you can't place a feature in front of the mirrored merge.
You can't place a feature above mirrored merge id 1.
It appears I'm getting the same results by choosing CSYS in part and assembly. The end result has the new part's Z direction in CSYS pointing in the down direction and not in the up direction as the original.
I hate to say this but I can't seem to duplicate that which I thought was an answer. I do appreciate the help you've already given. Hopefully there is a simple reason for the failure that still persists.
I don't know if there was something different and unique in my trial model or if it was my perception of the results.
I will attach snapshots of what I am seeing. In what I've seen the whole crux of the issue is that the mirror function doesn't know how to deal with the CSYS Local that we use to rotate the solid part.
1st of all I placed the ASCO CSYS in the assembly. The placement of this didn't seem to influence the result. Whether the ASCO was rotated 180 or placed straight up the result I received was the same.
I inserted the component that I needed mirrored using the Coincident constraint. For the component I used the PRT_CSYS_DEF. For the Assembly I used the ASCO which I created.
Next I set up the Mirror operation. This was done using the Create Component command. I used the mirror part option. I part referenced the inserted component. I planar referenced the RIGHT datum which I needed the mirror completed off of.
This mirrored the part. On 1st inspection the mirror looks correct. Unfortunately when you zoom into the CSYS area you see that the new part has a flipped Z orientation as shown.
This unfortunately means that the part that you Open has the views flipped. When you bring this part into another model such as Pro Mold you see that it is rotated 180 degrees out of position.
I'm trying to get help additionally from PTC tech support, but there are times when people who have to deal with the tools within Creo have a deeper understanding of how the software works.
Many places use a Mapkey to redefine the views so it's a 10 second process. Views are typically defined parametrically; if they are defined relative to the datum planes, the datum planes will appear in the same orientations as before; the solid geometry will appear to move, so that what appeared to be the top view of the part will result in a bottom view of the mirror - which is exactly what mirrors do.
The alternative to reversing the sign of the Z coordinate to create a mirror part is to use floating point transformations which can result in features failing to regenerate in the mirror that successfully worked in the original part; even if they don't fail they can be distorted by round-off or truncation errors.
I'm still missing what 'upside down and rotated 180 degrees' means to you. In this picture you say Z is rotated 180 degrees, but Z is an axis and cannot rotate. If it was mirrored, then the part would have a left-hand coordinate system, which AFAIK PTC doesn't support. It looks like the part is rotated 180 degrees about Y in the image, but the colors chosen blend too much to make out whatever detail you are emphasizing. Rotate the view around Y and the Z axis will point up.
It would help if the comparison images were from similar points of view, and similar scales and not have overlapping parts. I really can't tell what the difference is from zooming in on a CSYS that is the same size no matter how zoomed up it is. The above image cropped off the main feature that I use to tell if it is the mirror part and what the orientation is.
It would also help if you included a picture of the feature definition for all the new coordinate systems you made to show what the transformation definition was. When you show you are using a new one, it doesn't show that it was defined correctly. By default a new CSYS will have the exact same orientation and location as the default or previously selected CSYS. I suspect that's why it appeared to work one time and not another; it actually worked the same, but the definitions were different so the results looked different.
