When I imported my materials, some of them came in as a "Misc" category. Can someone tell me how to edit the category for each material? I would like to get these into the Metal/Steel category.
This new materials/apperance editor is going to take some getting use to. Its pretty confusing for me right now.
Hi,
Which library are you trying to add this appearance to ? A custom one, or your favorites or the Inventor one ? Does it make a difference which one you use ? Do you have write access to the .adsklib file on disk that you are trying to write to ?
The first time you write to a library, you are granted the lock on that adsklib file on disk. That is what the "Pencil" icon tells you. If you click on it then the lock will be released so that someone else can write to the file, (if you are working in a networked environment).
If others are also accessing that same file then they would see a different icon which tells them that the file on disk is different to what they have cached in memory & that a refresh is required for their current Inventor session to be back in-sync.
Any additional info you can supply ? Can you share the adsklib file you are trying to write to, & perhaps the Inventor file that contains this new appearance ?
Many Thanks,
Chris
ing.frison,
Sorry to hear of your issues over the weekend - were you able to resolve this ? Did you get any errors when you migrated your colors/materials./xml files to the new adsklib format ? Did you use the migrate command or were you recreating the materials/colors manually ?
Have you created a new custom library or have you added your own materials/appearances to the Inventor library ? The best recommendation is to use the Migrate command from the material/appearance browser & allow that to create you a new library which you can add to your project definition. Once you have done that you can remove the Autodesk &/or Inventor libraries if you do not need them.
You do not need to have DL19236676 installed since that was incorporated in to the update1 prior to SP1.1 being released.
From the crash reports you sent in, the issue appears to be specific to the physical material "ER 308L" - if you remove/recreate that asset, is Inventor more stable ?
Thanks,
Chris
First of all it's nice to see that somebody takes a look at things we send, so thank you Chris, and here some more info (and thank you also for the DL19236676 info... due to working 60 hour in 3 days I didn't have the time to check what exactly each SP includes).
1. no: I wasn't able to solve the stability issue
We have right now all workstations with PDS 2013 (except Inventor) and Inventor 2012 
2. a solution like the one suggested by Rob is not acceptable by us: my guys would run after me with a big knife to have my skull, and I couldn't even complain!! Anyway I tested the .adsklib both in \\path and in X:\path (mounted network path) and in local path, both RO and RW. No difference.
I am not afraid of the eventual need of creating a deployment strategy for our files: our system is already designed to checkIN/checkOUT several things, included FireFox profiles, .theme files, personal settings and so on. My people can freely route among computers without loosing their settings (and our .idcl files are over 1 Gbyte so they are also deployed). I am just not having a functioning .adsklib combination!!!
3.
I tried seveal strategies to create the adsklib files (that are incredibly working fine on ONE of my workstations!!!)
Assumed that our 2012 colors.xml and materials.xml were working perfectly, and doing perfectly their job (75 materials and 105 colors with less than 200 kBytes, with textures placed on a network share thus making the whole system not heavier, and so easy and quick to add a new material if you know a little of <xml>!!), I tried to migrate them with the command in the Materials Editor: no success
(how much do I wish to have back colors.xml and materials.xml)
I tried to save a 2012 .ipt file with all materials inside (the crash is coming from the Materials.adsklib being the active library, whils the Colors.adsklib works perfectly): openend in 2013 with the aim to save down to the library each material, but.... "no materials are present in this document" (and up in the dropdown I can select all my 75 materials!!! Perverse!!
I tried to create my materials using a copy of one material taken from the Inventor Material Library (those default adsklib files coming with inventor)... crash after 15 materials... (and nothing to do with ER308 and other welding staff). The first version of my .adsklib files all together 10 MBytes against 200 kBytes from the equivalent xml files!! But they are not working. With or without welding materials...
...and then I finished my ideas for different strategies for creating materials in the .adsklib files!!
I assume you are in touch with Cecy Chen... just in case you are not (and also to give the info to other readers) it seems that the issue was taken by Autodesk as a real bug (at least from the email that we received back from Cecy): Autodesk Inventor 2013 crash report (73736422)
So: my italian connections are working on the problem... my german connections will start tomorrow... Chris: I'm perfectly fine in sending you the 2012 materials/colors.xml (the one working fine!!) if you can try to do something with them... but I'm afraid it won't help much right now. Anyway let me know....
Till then... could you please ask your people to give us back the wonderful Materials/Colors.xml??
MaX
Hi Max,
A few comments:
You should be able to migrate both of these .xml files in to a single adsklib file - you can keep them separate but I don't know that you'll see any benefit from doing that.
Once you have migrated the xml files, you can add the same adsklib file for both Materials & Appearances in your project definition. If you get a message about No materials found" when editing your project just restart Inventor & retry it. the adsklib file can be either on the network (UNC or mapped drive) or local.
Warning - you should not copy the as-shipped Inventor adsklib file since each adsklib file contains GUID information that mean the same library cannot be loaded twice. If you copied the shipped adsklib file to a custom one & then try to use that as well as original you will see issues, (usually shown on the Material or Appearance browser as a warning). When you migrate or create a new library through the Ui the GUID info is updated accordingly.
Once you have migrated your materials/colors & added the resulting adsklib file to your project, then you can migrate other styles & custom content center parts that reference the materials from the library.
If your colors also reference texture files then you need to ensure that they can still be found in the same location.
If you don't resolve this through your local contacts then please send your colors & materials.xml files so that we can take a look at what's going wrong.
Thanks,
Chris
@ChrisMitchell01 wrote:Hi Max,
A few comments:
always appreciated
You should be able to migrate both of these .xml files in to a single adsklib file - you can keep them separate but I don't know that you'll see any benefit from doing that.
I forgot to mention: that was my original approach, just to keep continuity with the previous release.
The I of course tried to store both materials and appearances in the same .adsklib file... no difference again 
Once you have migrated the xml files, you can add the same adsklib file for both Materials & Appearances in your project definition. If you get a message about No materials found" when editing your project just restart Inventor & retry it. the adsklib file can be either on the network (UNC or mapped drive) or local.
...of course I will send you the xml files: I could never get a migrated version of my colors.xml and materials.xml, and I don't know the reason. They both work perfectly in the 2012, but I don't succeed in migrating them. that is why I created my libraries from scratch.
Warning - you should not copy the as-shipped Inventor adsklib file since each adsklib file contains GUID information that mean the same library cannot be loaded twice. If you copied the shipped adsklib file to a custom one & then try to use that as well as original you will see issues, (usually shown on the Material or Appearance browser as a warning). When you migrate or create a new library through the Ui the GUID info is updated accordingly.
Absolutely: I always created a new one from the material browser, then copied materials FROM the autodesk as-shipped TO the document. Edited, renamed and then copied DOWN TO my library. That is the procedure I followed.
If your colors also reference texture files then you need to ensure that they can still be found in the same location.
If you don't resolve this through your local contacts then please send your colors & materials.xml files so that we can take a look at what's going wrong.
I have about 105 colors. About 10 of them are referenced to local textures and bumps. I tried all my procedures also excluding those 10, but again no difference
Please let me know where to send my materials/colors.xml files (my local contacts are quite behind in the search for the problem: we are much more ahead, and Cecy Chen has already all debug, adsklib and dump files from this crash under the "Crash Report 73736422")
@Anonymous wrote:
The same location as what? As the adsklib files? As they were in the .xml files? How do we specify a location for texture files?
in the 2012, if you try to read the colors.xml file you will find per each color (which is called "Style" in the xml database) the following:
<Style InternalName="1:concrete_RoughWall" EditFlag="0" Ambient="0.33 0.33 0.33 1" Diffuse="0.63 0.63 0.63 1" Specular="0.75 0.75 0.75 1" Emissive="0.5 0.5 0.5 1" Shininess="40" IsMasked="0" Mask="0 0 0 1" Opacity="100" Scale="2" Rotation="90" TextureFile="relative path_to_textures\texture.jpg" TexturePath="2" ShowBackFaces="0" ReflectionImageFile="" ReflectionImagePath="0" Refraction="1" BumpMapImageFile="relative path_to_bumps\bump.jpg" BumpMapImagePath="2" BumpMapAmount="1" BumpMapScale="2" BumpMapRotation="90" ProteinMaterialId="" ProteinMaterialScale="1" ProteinMaterialRotation="0">
The xml attribute TexturePath is normally set to "0". If you set it to "2", then your relative path will begin from the currently set "Content Center Files" path, wherever it is set. In my specific case it was absolutly easy and fast to handle this folder centralized (as normally also the ccFiles are) regarding textures and bumps, and I could get immediately deployed any textured color that we needed.
In the 2013 I still couldn't get to a point to run extensive tests on this, but as far as I could understand it there is NO WAY (again congratulations to Autodesk) to define the path of the textures/bumps/reflection maps. That means that in a real network environment you can only save this folder into a network path, and give the full path of your maps in the editor. A workaround to this limitation could be to mount a network drive... slim consolation anyway (why should we keep easy things easy when we can make them mor complicated??
)
But as I said don't take me as granted: I couldn't run extensive experiments on the new wonderful material library architecture...
Now it's a nightmare in comparison (but don't be surprised: I could edit xml files as I wanted because I have quite much experience in xml language, even thou that is absolutely not complicated). Evidently something went wrong, because the 2013 does not accept our perfectly working 2012 xml files!!
Hope it helps...
MaX
You can send the xml files to me at chris.mitchell@autodesk.com - I'll see what I can find out about this.
-Chris
Max,
Many Thanks for sending all the info - we've identified the cause of the issue & are working on a fix for this for an upcoming update. I'll let you know as things progress.
Thanks,
Chris
Hi Massimo.
A fix for the problems you reported is currently being tested; it's planned for release within the next 2-3 weeks. It will be incorporated in to "SP1.1 update2". The issue was related to some illegal characters in your xml files which were not being handled appropriately during the migration to adsklib & subsequently causing problems in the material/appearance browser.
Thanks,
Chris
From my side the illegal characters were coming from inventor standard libraries, thus the problem was not "some illegal characters in our xml files" but "some illegal characters in autodesk standard xml files". But maybe these are not the illegal characters that Chris is talking about... 
Each item has a multilanguage description like:
<Style InternalName="1:Wood_cherry
" EditFlag="0" Density="0.5" YoungsModulus="10.3" PoissonsRatio="0.392" YieldStrength="49" UltimateTensileStrength="3.9" ThermalConductivity="0.12" LinearExpansion="4.5" SpecificHeat="1.2" WeldmentMaterial="0" ExternalMaterialId="2:MATERIAL:MI_InventorSustainability:F5BAD8E7-A593-4851-944B-C9EE2740032B:6E6E40AC-4081-41D9-9050-0F7267D138A8:0">
<SubStyle Type="ColorStyle" Language="1033" Collection="Colors">Wood (Cherry)</SubStyle>
<Name Language="1028" Description="">木材 (櫻桃木)</Name>
<Name Language="1029" Description="">Dřevo (třešeň)</Name>
<Name Language="1031" Description="">Holz (Kirschbaum)</Name>
<Name Language="1033" Description="">wood (cherry)</Name>
<Name Language="1036" Description="">Bois (cerisier)</Name>
<Name Language="1038" Description="">Fa (cseresznye)</Name>
<Name Language="1040" Description="">legno (ciliegio)</Name>
<Name Language="1041" Description="">Wood (Cherry)</Name>
<Name Language="1042" Description="">나무(체리)</Name>
<Name Language="1045" Description="">Drewno (wiśnia)</Name>
<Name Language="1046" Description="">Madeira (Cerejeira)</Name>
<Name Language="1049" Description="">Дерево (вишня)</Name>
<Name Language="2052" Description="">木材(樱桃木)</Name>
<Name Language="3082" Description="">Madera (cerezo)</Name>
</Style>
The same happens for the colors.xml
But actually the xml files were perfectly coherent with what specified in the xml definition (the first line of the file):
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
as the xml file opened without any problem in any browser.
Keep in mind that Autodesk is not new to do things a little bit "artistic", for example:
<SubStyle Type="ColorStyle" Language="1033" Collection="Colors">Wood (Cherry)</SubStyle>
up here is so composed (it's a little bit tricky, but it's like that... amazing) 
Nevertheless we learnt to live with it, and everything was working fine... so far.
I didn't have any other illegal characters.
And i still prefer the xml architecture
The current status of 2013 SP1.1 Update2 shows that it should be released around Feb 5th, (subject to outcome of on-going testing).
Thanks,
Chris
