Styles getting out of hand

[ZX_Spectrum_48k]

Hi,

We are noticing an explosion of styles in derived assemblies

e.g.

Stainless - Brushed _1

Stainless - Brushed _2

Stainless - Brushed _3

Stainless - Brushed _4

etc

These won't purge in a parent assembly even with purge styles from all child documents ticked.

If you open the part you can purge the styles.

Taking minutes to open the style dialog box in parent assemblies because of the quantity of styles  in child documents?

Is there a problem with the purge styles command?

Edited by
Discussion_Admin

[cbenner]

What version of Inventor?

[LT.Rusty]

I get this in 2013 Pro.  I haven't tried it in 2014, and I didn't notice it in earlier versions, but then I hadn't tried to do a whole lot of deriving before 2013.

Basically, what happens is that when you derive an assembly, all the appearances that you had on your separate parts come through into the new part as overrides applied to the individual faces of the new part.  This is fine, so long as you didn't have more than one part with the same appearance.

If, however, you have three parts that are all made of the same material and they have the same appearance, when you derive the assembly into a single part, you'll see that the appearance for each part was brought in separately.  For example, you'll get Default (1), Default (2) and Default (3), in addition to the Default that was already in the new part file.

Usually at this point I'll just take a few minutes and clear out all the overrides, set everything to the Default (or whatever) that's from the appearance library, and then I'll delete all of the Default (x)'s from the appearance browser.

[ZX_Spectrum_48k]

Using Inventor 2014 update 2. In previous versions you could tick the purge from child documents tick box and purge everything from your top assembly rather than having to repeat the same command on every part which is obviously far more time consuming. There seems to be a bug in that this command appears to no longer function as it should?

If you are working in large assemblies I find you need to keep your machine overhead as low as possible, not being able to purge excess styles effectively makes this harder.

[LT.Rusty]

Hell, the clear overrides button doesn't even always work on an individual part file, even in versions before 2014.

There's plenty of times when I've used the clear overrides function in 2013, still had half my part with the wrong appearance, then tracked down each individual feature for which some motherless IDIOT had changed the properties, found that still didn't clear everything out, then had to look at each solid body one after the other, and found that didn't get everything, and then I've had to still go in and clear 5 or 10 faces individually, one by one.

This is nothing new.