topic Re: Finish Feature - Add appearance to document appearances in Inventor Forum

Finish Feature - Add appearance to document appearances

k.hendrickx — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 13:07:44 GMT

In the new Finish feature, we've added a full list of all our RAL colours that we use including their corresponding codes with our painter.

Now all these have been assigned an appearance from an dedicated RAL appearance library (we don't want all the RAL colors between our regular library appearances).

However we've noticed that if you do not have the right library activated, the change in appearance when selecting a RAL color doesn't work, it's as if Inventor can't find the appearance.

Now this is solvable by making sure you activate the correct library when adding the Finish feature...

However this is by far not where the trouble ends.

If you now place this part with the correct RAL color in to a different assembly, the RAL color again doesn't show until you've activated the correct appearance library once. This is very cumbersome and also defeats the entire purpose of being able to apply a finish feature. Also in drawings where a part or assembly with a finish feature is placed the problem is even worse.

I think the main problem lies in the fact that unlike the normal material and appearances that get copied from the library to the document before use, the Finish feature does not do this, the appearance does not get copied and if I send the file with the Finish feature to a colleague or external partner that doesn't have the exact same RAL library available, they will not see the correct appearance.

At the moment this makes the Finish feature quite useless in comparison to an old appearance override, which does work all the time even with people who do not have access to the RAL library. The appearance just comes along with the part or assembly.

As an example, I've added some random part which on my screen looks like this:

but according to my findings, should when you open it have no different colored faces anymore.

The second file is with using the appearance override, which will open without loosing the appearances.

Re: Finish Feature - Add appearance to document appearances

johnsonshiue — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 05:12:29 GMT

Hi! Many thanks for sharing the findings! The behavior does not sound right to me. I thought the appearance style of a Finish feature should be stored in the ipt/iam file. There should not be a need to activate the library. I could be wrong. I need to check with the project team and understand the behavior better.

Thanks again!

Re: Finish Feature - Add appearance to document appearances

johnsonshiue — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 13:13:47 GMT

Hi! This is indeed a known issue, INVGEN-69665, currently targeting 2024.3 update. In the meantime, you want to make sure all users have the same custom library. It is a good practice to have such setup to avoid having inconsistent styles (same name with different settings).

Many thanks!

Re: Finish Feature - Add appearance to document appearances

k.hendrickx — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 14:48:30 GMT

Well from my understanding, this has always been the reason why the material and appearance editor always make a copy which is saved in the document. To prevent unwanted discrepancies between different users/libraries, which makes it easy to exchange models between different people and always have the material/appearance available in the document itself.

The drawback of this however is that when a change or update happens to an appearance, the documents must be manually updated to the new library appearance.

Are there any plans to for example have the option to make the document appearance "associative" with the library appearance?

Anyway, great news that this is a known issue and targeted for the 2024.3 update 😊