topic Re: Assigning an appearance to an assembly in Inventor Forum

Assigning an appearance to an assembly

mbloom62LNK — Wed, 14 Jun 2023 15:52:47 GMT

My company is revamping our drawing standards and I'm trying to simplify our paint and finish callouts for welded assemblies. (I know Inventor 2024 adds a finishing tool, (I don't know if it can assign a finish for an assembly) but for now we are stuck with Inventor 2022 until we get Vault set up and configured.)

I'm currently trying to do this through the appearance tab with a custom appearance library that contains all of our paint colors and finishes which works well for individual parts but is empty for assemblies, see image below:

In our drawings the appearance is automated using the "primary model <appearance>" property, but I cant find a way to assign that for an assembly. Converting the assembly to a weldment and setting it's BOM structure to inseparable does not fix this.

I know this can be done manually with a custom iProperty, but part of this revamp is to automate as much as possible and being able to select a finish from a drop down menu would be a lot easier and more consistent.

Re: Assigning an appearance to an assembly

mluterman — Wed, 14 Jun 2023 16:54:26 GMT

Derive it into an .ipt file and keep a library of those instead.

Re: Assigning an appearance to an assembly

mbloom62LNK — Wed, 14 Jun 2023 19:09:09 GMT

Do you mean create a bunch of empty part files with the custom iProperty and add that to the assembly? We do something similar for parameterized models but I'm not sure how to refer to that "finish" property in the assembly drawing.

Re: Assigning an appearance to an assembly

swalton — Wed, 14 Jun 2023 19:19:14 GMT

My understanding is that assembly files don't have appearances. Instead, the assembly stores local appearance overrides for each member component in each assembly design view rep.

You may need to change your process/code to collect all the components in an assembly, then apply an appearance to that set.