Exploding manufacturer-provided block, changes block color.

[mimenoh]

Hi all!

Tried looking for an answer to this on the forums for hours, couldn't find a working solution.

I have a manufacturer-provided .step model that I imported to my drawing. I have an annoying issue with it where exploding the block or converting it to and equipment, changes to color of the whole thing to black.

I have attached screenshots where there's duplicate blocks to show what it looks like and another to select to show the properties palette in one screenshot.

"unmodified" shows the unmodified block reference that comes from importing the .step file. 

"once exploded" shows that after exploding the block it becomes 3D solid and the colors show correctly in the viewport. However, I noticed that the Color in properties is set to black (Color 250). Changing this will change the whole 3D solid to that color, also ByLayer and ByBlock option change to color of the whole thing to white. Also after touching this option, there's no way to get back to original colors for the model.

In "twice exploded" you can see that the model becomes thousands of surfaces and regions and changes to black. 

My question is: is there a way to preserve the original colors of the model when converting to equipment, without going to the block editor and manually coloring dozens and dozens of parts?

Thanks in advance.

[Michiel.Valcke]

short answer: no

slightly longer answer:

you don't really want to from a Plant 3D point of view. For custom parts/equipments you want block based definitions to be based on layer 0 and colored 'ByBlock' This will enable the Project Settings that govern coloring to work as intended.
Especially for inline items such as valves this is really practical, for Equipment as is your case a bit less so.

the untested workaround answer:

Don't explode your imported block. convert it directly to an equipment. If the individual parts are set to specific colors they should retain those colors. Is there any chance you can share your .stp then we can see if we can test this workaround.

[mimenoh]

Hi! 

That's unfortunate, but thanks for the answer nonetheless. 

I've tried converting the block to equipment at before and after exploding, result is the same black color.

Attached it the .stp. 

I appreciate the help.

[Michiel.Valcke]

I just checked, the colors are face override properties, which are indeed reset. If you want to modify this you would have to break up the 3D solid into different 3D solids (slice and solidedit/body/separate command) and give them the actual color you want them to have.

In that scenario you will be able to keep the colors, but it is a lot of work to do manually. It might be changed based on how the .stp was created.