Confused about Appearance Library and Material Library styles.

[Garren1013]

Ever since I installed Inventor 2013, there is this new thing added called Autodesk Appearance Library.  Trying to update styles in my template files and there are a few styles that will not update completely as they keep switching back and forth between the Appearance Library and the Material Library no matter how many times I hit update. This is when I switch under the "Compare materials against" drop down menu under Update Styles.  Why does it do this?  Can I fix it?  Will it hurt anything to leave it as it is?

[LT.Rusty]

I don't have an answer to your specific issue, but I'll tell you the Appearance stuff has been a major headache for me, too.  There doesn't seem to be any consistency or predictability in the behavior that the appearances exhibit.  Somehow I've wound up with "Default (2)" as the actual default, instead of "Default," and it looks like it's got a Fibreglass bump map laid over it.  Also, somehow, my "Steel, Mild" material - in spite of having the material "Steel" assigned to it - keeps getting "Default (2)" laid over top, and the only way to get "Steel" back in place is to override the appearance.

Blah.  I could go on and on and on about the issues we've been having with the new setup.  From end to end it's been nothing but a hassle.  I understand the goal they're trying to reach, but it just doesn't seem to want to work really well for me yet.

I'm sure there's some rational thing going on here, but I just haven't figured out what the method is to the madness yet.

[japike]

We have been working with partially updated material styles in our templates for some time. The physical assets seem to be working fine, but the appearance assets don't seem to always be correct and we can't get edits to save properly. We've been just applying appearance overrides when we need the color to be correct. 

[LT.Rusty]

Have you been able to consistently save appearances and materials to the Inventor Material Library or to Favorites and have them available in other documents?  That's been an issue for me.  The fiberglass mentioned above is a good example of this, actually.  I created an appearance called "Fiberglass, Gray" and a material called "Fiberglass," which used some custom physical properties and the appearance "Fiberglass, Gray."  Worked great ... for that part.  Saved them both to the Inventor Material Library and ... nothing.  Not there.  Of course now I seem to have this "Default (2)" that wants to show up over everything else, and looks suspiciously like "Fiberglass, Gray." 

And for some reason when I open parts that were last saved in 2011, any steel materials now look like Polymer Concrete, even for 2011 content center parts?  Not sure what happened there, but it took me several hours of open-change material-save to fix ...