MBD & PMI Authoring Assistant
MBD & PMI Authoring Assistant
The drawing died. The annotations moved into the model — and someone still types every one of them.
The MBD & PMI Authoring Assistant creates PMI and MBD annotations in Siemens NX: on request from chat, or derived from specifications and legacy drawings — datum schemes, feature control frames, note sets, all as semantic, machine-readable PMI per your house norms. Every annotation set is proposed as a preview; the engineer reviews, edits and releases. It authors; it does not release.
It is the authoring counterpart to our MBD/PMI Compliance Automation: that toolset checks annotations against your rules at release — this assistant writes them during design. Same terminology, same norms, two ends of the same pipeline. Part of the NX AI Assistants & Chatbots family.
Prefer rules over conversation? Rule-Based PMI Creation prepares the repetitive share of PMI from your norms and MBD templates as reviewable jobs — the workflow-side counterpart to this assistant.
Which PMI types an agent can place on the 3D model today, and how that fits next to NX’s MBD Logic Editor and PMI Advisor, is covered on NX MBD with AI.
Who this is for
- Your customers or your roadmap demand MBD-annotated models, and PMI authoring is the new manual bottleneck.
- Designers copy annotation patterns from old parts — inheriting yesterday’s mistakes at semantic level.
- You are migrating 2D legacy drawings to MBD, and re-typing GD&T from paper into PMI is measured in months.
- PMI exists but is decorative text, not semantic — downstream CMM and CAM tools can’t read it.
- Datum schemes and FCFs follow house norms that only two people actually master.
// From requirement to reviewed PMI — one pass
“Bearing seats ø40: locate to datum A–B, runout ≤ 0.02. Surfaces Ra 1.6.”
- Datum features A, B defined on both bearing seats · semantic
- FCF: circular runout 0.02 | A–B attached to ø40 faces · semantic
- Surface finish Ra 1.6 on seat faces, per house template TN-12 · semantic
- Note set + model views organized per your MBD template · semantic
Machine-readable, not decorative. Every annotation is created as semantic PMI — attached to faces, carrying its meaning — so CMM programming, CAM and your compliance check can read it. The engineer reviews the set and releases it; nothing enters the model unreviewed.
Authoring and checking: one family, two jobs
MBD/PMI Compliance Automation
Verifies annotations against your rules and customer requirements at release — batch, deterministic, gate-keeping. What this assistant writes, that gate later verifies.
runs: at the release gate, every part
What it authors
Datum schemes & FCFs per house norm
“Datum scheme for this bracket, house standard” — proposed with your preferred datum strategy for the part class, not a textbook default.
Legacy drawing migration
GD&T read from the legacy drawing, authored as semantic PMI on the 3D model — the months-long re-typing project, compressed, with every annotation reviewed.
Requirement lists → annotations
Tolerance and surface requirements from customer specs turned into attached, checkable PMI — instead of living in a PDF nobody opens in NX.
Note sets, views & templates
Standard note blocks, model view organization, MBD template conformity — the boilerplate that eats afternoons, applied consistently.
How it connects
Authoring runs through the Vision4NX Connector and NXOpen’s PMI APIs in your NX session — annotations appear live on the model as previews. Specification and drawing inputs are processed on your infrastructure (the same extraction technology behind our drawing-data services). On-premises or EU cloud; model-agnostic on the assistant side via MCP.
Honest limits
It never invents a tolerance. Every value the assistant authors traces to a source: your chat request, the legacy drawing, the spec, or your house norm’s default for that feature class. Where the source is silent, the assistant asks — a guessed tolerance on a released model is the one failure mode this architecture refuses. And the engineer who releases the annotation set signs it, exactly as with hand-authored PMI: the assistant shortens the typing, not the responsibility.
Migration quality depends on drawing quality. Clean drawings migrate nearly automatically; scanned faxes route more annotations through the review queue. The PoC measures the split on your real drawings, per source — you see the review effort before committing to the archive. Bulk migration of thousands of drawings is a program built on this assistant plus our drawing data extraction pipeline — we scope it honestly as such.
Fixed price — fixed scope
Authoring PoC
from €14,500 fixed
- Your MBD template + house norms encoded for one part class
- Chat authoring + one migration path (spec-to-PMI or drawing-to-PMI) live in your NX
- 20 real parts annotated and reviewed by your engineers
- Accuracy & review-effort report per annotation type — your parts, your numbers
- Rollout blueprint incl. wiring into the compliance gate
5–7 weeks · price creditable against rollout · templates and rules are yours either way.
For comparison
Hand-authored MBD
hours per part
- Every FCF picked, placed and attached by hand — per feature, per part
- Annotation patterns copied from old parts, mistakes included
- 2D→MBD migration backlog measured in designer-months
Frequently asked questions
What is a PMI authoring assistant?
How is this different from your MBD/PMI compliance automation?
Can it invent tolerances?
Which standards does it speak?
Is the authored PMI really machine-readable?
Who is responsible for a released annotation?
Related in the family: the Live Model Check Assistant flags rule violations while you model, and the Drawing & Documentation Assistant covers the parts that still need sheets. Overview: NX AI Assistants & Chatbots.
Somewhere in your archive is a drawing whose GD&T someone will re-type next month. Send it to us instead.
One legacy drawing plus its 3D model — we’ll return the model with the drawing’s GD&T authored as semantic PMI, traceability list included, ready for your review.
Talk to an EngineerPoC from €14,500 · fixed scope · creditable against rollout · on-premises option
