LOD's & color... let's be concise

[Anonymous]

Looking for direct answers to a direct questions.

"Will LOD's alone provide for multiple, colored (the color changes, see?) & multiple states of Suppression representations"?

"Are a combination of LOD's and Design View Rep's required to provide for multiple, colored (the color changes, see?) & multiple states of Suppression representations"?

Just in case I haven't made myself clear, I need to display an assembly with BOTH;

1.  items Suppressed
2.  items color changed from representations on other pages

Thanks in advance!

[jtylerbc · Accepted solution]

LOD does not affect color, only suppression.  Its primary purpose is for memory management (takes the suppressed components out of the computer's memory).  It also renders them invisible.  You can save multiple states (by creating multiple LOD's).

View Representations can control color overrides.  They can't control suppression.  However, they can turn off visibility.  The components will still be loaded in memory, but will be invisible.  Visually, this looks the same as suppression - it just doesn't relieve the memory usage.

If you actually need the components out of the computer's memory, you will need to use a combination of LOD and View Rep to get what you want.  If you only need them to be visually removed, then View Representations can take care of all of it.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for adding the distinction between visibility & suppression!

My assemblies often hover @ or above 20,000 parts and supression (along with constraint minimization & part re-use) is/are valuable tools/workflows/concepts that keep the click-to-result times as low as possible!

You are appreciated!

[jtylerbc]

In that case, you'll probably want to use the combination of LOD's and View Representations.  Keep in mind to help you set it up, that you can use them in different combinations (at any point in time, you can pick both a View Rep and a LOD - you're not stuck choosing one or the other).  Also, you can create an LOD from a View Rep (or vice versa) by right clicking on it in the browser.  When doing this, Visibility gets replaced with Suppression (or vice versa, depending on which way you're going).

I don't know your situation, so I can't really tell you how you should organize it.  But those tools may come in handy and save you some duplicated work.

Confusion between Suppression and Visibility / LOD and View Representations is pretty common.  The biggest issue is typically people using Suppression where Visibility would be a better fit, and causing themselves unnecessary grief as a result.  I suspect that comes from other systems behaving differently, or using the same terms differently.  In addition to what I've told you here, I'd suggest reading up on the subject a bit from the help files.