I have encountered an issue where I have imported an external assembly into my main assembly, but component color cycling does not produce a unique color for each of the sub-components. Here's an example:
I don't see an option to be able to change the colors. Is this a bug?
Closing and reopening the model will may give you different colors. I also think it's a bug that the colors are reused instead of contrasting or unique.
ETFrench
Component color cycling has a limited number of colors that are used, so it is certainly probable that you will encounter situations where you will get adjacent components with the same color. It's kind of a variation of the Graph Coloring Problem.
If you can share the model of the example that you show, we can take a look at it and see if there is anything that is unique about this model that is causing the repetition. It could be that the algorithm needs some tweaking.
Jeff
Ben Korez
Fusion 360 NewbiesPlus
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Save and reopen doesn't help. I posted a pic of this mould in another thread about hatch patterns and you can see although the colour's different (thumbnail in data panel is blue), both plates are still the same colour. Even worse is the hatch patterns match when sectioned as well.
In this case it's easy enough to tell which part is which but there are cases with springs and washers where it get confusing.
Mark
Mark Hughes
Owner, Hughes Tooling
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The way that Component Color Cycling works is it cycles between 9 different colors. That means that if you have 10 or more components, you will get duplicate colors. And there is no attempt made to spatially sort these color assignments. It is done, more or less, by the order in which they were created. So, you will also get cases where you have adjacent components with the same color.
Why do we limit the colors to 9? No real good reason, although expanding that number is a bit bigger project than it at first seems, because there are the corresponding color swatches in the browser and timeline that match those colors, so the range of colors are somewhat limited. But, we could probably fairly easily expand this to, say 20 without too much work. But, that would only really push the problem out. If you had a plate with 25 components on it, you would still encounter the case where one of those components' color was the same as the plate.
Why don't we try to do this spatially? That's a good suggestion, and maybe it should be on the Fusion Idea Station. I would encourage you to add it there, and see if others share this requirement. It would certainly be possible to do this, although it is probably a pretty challenging technical problem to solve. But, we could certainly do a better job on this than we do today.
@Beyondforce asked about the ability to set a color in this mode. Today, no, there is no way to override the colors that component color cycling chooses. Perhaps that would be another Idea Station suggestion. But, today, at least, as you have all observed, the colors are not persisted, so we would have to persist them in order for this to be "sticky".
Component Color Cycling is just a little tool that you allows you to get a more clearer picture about where component boundaries are, but it is not a perfect tool. It is limited in what it can do. Maybe in the future we can enhance this. But, for now, you are unfortunately stuck with what is there. I, myself, sometimes just assign Appearances to my components manually, because I know that this is persisted, and the colors will be the same the next time.
Sorry not to have better answers here.
Jeff
I don't understand, why this tool is undervalued. As you can see, many of us are using it, because it is a brilliant tool! It's helps a lot when you have many components and you want to differentiate between them and create contrast. I personally using it all the time.
I think the team needs to give it more Love and attention. @HughesTooling will you add a suggestion in the Idea station? I'm confident many will vote for it.
Cheers / Ben.
Ben Korez
Fusion 360 NewbiesPlus
Fusion 360 Hardware Benchmark
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Any progress on this? I have 3 components, and all 3 have the same color, which makes timeline component view rather incomprehensible. Also, why not let users change component colors?
@osman-pasha Have you tried right click the component in the browser then click cycle component colour?
Mark Hughes
Owner, Hughes Tooling
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@osman-pasha There's no problem cycling the colour. The problem in this thread was that the colour did not change to match the colour of the colour cycling Rereading I see it was actually about imports and sometimes ending up with touching components with the same colour, should be a bit better now as there are more colours.
Note there are now about 22 colours for each environment setting.
Mark Hughes
Owner, Hughes Tooling
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