This is kind of bugging me...
I'm just started using inventor 2013 (from 2010) & the way colours/materials are applied has completely changed so I'm learning again from scratch.
Here's my issue: A customer has sent a casting to me in Parasolid format. When I open it, all the unmachined surface are blue & look a bit garish. However, the colours of the machined faces are ok & I wish to keep them.
So, I want to chage all the surfaces that are blue - I can use the picker & select all the blue faces seperately (by holding CTRL down & select each face one be one) but this is a pain & takes ages (there are over 200 faces)
I can see & edit the blue color in the manager but how do I tell Inventor to replace all - can it be done?
Cheers.
I'm afraid that it looks like manual selection, if this is to be believed (Autodesk Help Page);
Would it be easier to change the entire part colour (based on the top toolbar), then select the machined faces and change them - if there are fewer faces of course.
If you have a model tree with all of the cuts, extrusions etc, you could change them individually.
Many times, at least with STEP & SolidWorks imports, changing the part color/appearance doesn't affect the individual faces. To wipe out all the individual face colors, right click on the solid body (Solid1, typically), select Properties, then change the Body Appearance to "As Part" and select Clear All Overrides.
In your case, I guess it depends on how many cast faces vs. machined faces. You can pick all the blue faces and change them, or your can revert everything to As Part and pick the machined faces. You'll have to manually pick one or the other.
Sorry for the extremely late reply - I've was taken off this project to work on something else but I'm back on it now.
Thanks for the reply & help sbixler. I will take a look later & report back.
The machined faces are extremely hard to pick as they are inside & difficult to see, so to gobally change the external cast faces is much easier.
Thanks.