Materials/Style Library Problems

[avaya2012]

Earlier today I had made a list of new materials with unique apperances.  I had them in my Favorites material drop down and saved in the library.  Everything was working great.  I then tried to add a couple more materials from the Autodesk Material Library to my Favorites list in the Material Brower.  That is when my problems started happening.  Many of my appearances started changing. 

I had multiple aluminums in my favorites folder. Aluminum, Mill Finsh; Aluminum, Polished Finish; Aluminum, Tread Plate; etc.  I then added the material Aluminum 6061 to my Favorites and the appearances all changed to the 6061 appearance. 

My materials in the QAT materials drop down menu still look good.  The appearance does not change with the selected material though.  When I go into the Material Browser there are multiples of the same mat'l in the Document Materials section and some are missing.  I cannot rename a multiple to the missing name because it says the name is already in use. 

I am fairly new to making new materials and saving items to the library so I may not be understanding everything correctly.  Any ideas here?  Can I delete all my materials out of the library and just start over?

[jletcher]

You are talking 2013 right?

[avaya2012]

Yes, 2013.  I may be getting some of it figured out but any help would be appreciated.

[SBix26]

Welcome to the half-baked implementation of Autodesk Materials & Appearances!  From my battle with this stuff over the last few months, I believe that your experience is normal.  Things that you thought were saved aren't really, things that look good in one section (Favorites, for example) aren't when saved to a library, or simply won't save to a library.  Appearances that don't appear in the Document section of the browser nevertheless are available to be purged in the Purge Styles box, or perhaps appear in the Update Styles box.

Better yet, a material can have a defined Appearance asset, but when you use that material, it doesn't change to that appearance, it uses the first appearance in the active library instead.  Go back and edit the material, and sure enough, there's the appearance that you assigned, but it won't show in the part except while you're editing the material.

There's also no clear explanation that I've found for how this is all actually structured.  How can a material have an appearance asset, or a physical asset, that aren't in a library?  Or are they?  Where are Favorites stored?

Then there's the user interface, which is not in the least friendly or intuitive, works nothing like any other Inventor dialogs.  Open the Material Browser, open the material editor to edit a material, open the Appearance Browser to select an appearance asset, think better of it, hit Escape to close that Appearance dialog (like you would every other Inventor dialog) and wham! you get to start all over because that Escape closed not only the Appearance browser, but also the material edit box and the Material browser!!

Sorry for the rant, but this Appearance implementation has cost me a huge number of hours over the last few months and has delayed our roll-out of 2013.  And I'm still not completely confident that it's all working right.

[avaya2012]

So is there a way that I can get the materials I created out of the Favorites and out of the document?  Basically delete them all and start from scratch.  I am thinking that would be my best bet now.

[avaya2012]

And please don't say to use the Styles Manager Library unless you elaborate.  It seems that answer is given a lot for a situation like this.  I have been in the Styles Manager Library and I cannot find anything that looks like it pertains to this.

[trumpy81]

avaya2012, First off, did you really create new materials or did you simply create 'Appearances' with material names?

Could you step us through your creation process please and in what environment did you create the materials/appearances?.

I ask, because there seems to be a right way and a wrong way of doing it and as you have discovered, things don't always save the way you think they should.

[avaya2012]

I am new to making materials and using the styles library so it is likely I did not create these correctly. 

I was in a new sheet metal part and went to the Material Browser.  In lower half of the browser window I clicked on Autodesk Material Library then double clicked a Material.  In this case lets say Aluminum.  I then changed the name and appearance properties to my liking.  After doing that I would double click that material in the upper half (Document Materials) and click duplicate.  I would then modify this to the next material and so on.  It looked like I had them saved properly in the Styles Library because I could create a new part and would have everythign I modified.  Everything seemed to be going smoothly until I went back and tried to add Aluminum 6061 to my Favorites which reverted my cusomized material appearances to the Aluminum 6061.  I then did some purging and updating to try to get back to what I had with no luck.  I was kind of just winging it there, so I would guess my issue came up somewhere there.

All the materials I made do show up in the Material drop down menu.  They just dont seem to be linked properly to the appearance I had set up and I cannot update them individually anymore.

[trumpy81]

avaya2012, when creating new materials click on the sphere with the blue cross at the bottom left of the materials editor and go through the whole process of setting up a new material. You can copy the parameters from other existing materials but try to always create new ones this way.

I have found that duplicating existing materials and renaming them doesn't always work and it seems that you have found that also. It appears as though any duplicated material retains it's original properties despite the fact that you have made changes and renamed it which is most likely why your duplicated materials have reverted to Alum 6061.

You will sometimes encounter similar problems if you simply rename existing materials. Also, in some cases, you need to shut down Inventor and restart it before you can use your new material as it will sometimes appear in the list but it doesn't apply the appearances and parameters you have set. It appears in these instances, as though the material definition is not updated in ram, so Inventor will use whatever is in ram instead of the new definition.

In other cases, the new material will not show up in the list at all until after Inventor has been restarted.

Also, sometimes when linking a new material to an existing appearance the appearance is not applied even after restarting Inventor. In that case I have found that if I change to another existing appearance, save, restart, then revert back to my intended appearance, save, restart, it will then work fine, but more than once I have deleted it and started again, but that's probably my impatience coming into play more than anything else ... lol