Multi-body solids and applying appearances

[BrandonBG]

Taking Materials out of the discussion entirely, does anyone have best practices for applying Appearances to multi-body solids?

Let's say I extrude two (or more) solids within a part.

(1.) I can apply appearances to a FEATURE (Properties-->Feature Appearance),

or

(2.) I can apply appearances to a SOLID BODY (Properties-->Body Appearance),

or

(3.) I can apply appearances to each FACE of the solid (Properties-->Face Appearance),

or

(4.) I can apply an appearances to the whole PART which gets all the solids.

Is there a hierarchy to this? Why do they sometimes show as default grey in a drawing? Then there's also the issue of applying appearances at the assembly level which seems to work the same as (4.).

Brandon

[KevinLi-Autodesk]

Hi BrandonBG,

Thanks for reporting!

Inventor has the different priority of these types of colors, from high to low its priority is face color -> feature color -> body color -> part color.

And yes the color can also be supported to applied under assembly level which called instance color.

For this question "Why do they sometimes show as default grey in a drawing?", if I understand correctly seems the appearance you selected does not applied to face/feature/body/part/instance. Can you provide a detail step or a simple model to reproduce it here ? What's the Inventor version you use ? or discuss via my email Hongyuan.Li@autodesk.com . I will double check it at my side.

Regards,

[johnsonshiue]

Hi! To add to the matrix, there is more consideration. If the MSB part stays as MSB within an assembly, coloring within MSB should be fine. If you use Make Components (Parts) command or derive each solid as an individual part, Derive Part feature will carry source body colors as Feature Color in the derived part. This behavior can be confusing sometimes. Especially, if there is transparency in the source color. Transparency is turned off when applied as feature color to avoid the back faces from being seen.

If you are using this workflow, I suggest you do not color the source part. Then manage the colors within individual derived parts. Let me know if more information is needed.

Thanks!

[BrandonBG]

I'm using Inventor 2014.

This is outside the drawing environment, but it's essentially the same issue. Here's my process:

(1.) create PART:1, a multi-solid - I apply the appearance to the two SOLIDS.

(2.) copy PART:1, creating PART:2, but the appearance doesn't carry over.

(3.) create PART B:1, another identical multi-solid - I apply the appearance to the two extrusion FEATURES.

(4.) copy PART B:1, creating PART B:3, and the appearances do carry over.

I think I'm missing a key difference, but I don't know what.

Thanks.

Brandon

[johnsonshiue]

Hi! The behavior is indeed a bit confusing here. Starting from R2013, solid body appearance has become an Assembly Design View controllable attribute. So, the solid body appearance override is actually stored at the assembly level design view, not at the part level. As a result, adding a new occurrence of the same part does not carry over the appearance override.

The Feature color or Face color override cannot be controlled by Design View. As a result,such change has to be saved back in the part document. And, the change will carry over to a new occurrence.

Thanks!