Default materials vs part appearance in assemblies and exporting.

[Anonymous]

Just downloaded the tool yesterday and have been chewing through the short tutorial video and the other online resources.  So far, am loving the tool bar the network performance (but with offline mode, 'tis merely an annoyance).

Once I got the structure down to making each feature its own component in an assembly, really started making good progress only to slam into the material versus appearance issue and how a model exports.

I have set each sub-component's appearance to what I want to but when I go to export the assembly, the defaul material overrides the part appearances and get the infamous grey-body upon import.

Read quite a few posts, but nothing quite seems to work.  The only thing I've accomplished in a couple of hours of tinkering seems to be able to change the shade of the grey-body that gets imported.

Steps I've attempted:

• opened each sub-component appearance and dragged the torus representing what I wanted onto the appropriate body in the model space : result = grey body export of assembly
• opened the assembly appearance and dragged the same tori to each body and exported : result = grey body export again
• tried both ways from above by only setting materials and not messing with appearances at all : result = slightly different shade grey body

Really am loving the tool so far but this is in the top 3 of functions I really need.

Any suggestions?

[NicolasXu · Accepted solution]

Hi whtmountain,

Welcome to the Fusion world!

When you exported the assembly, which file format did you select? In a Fusion assembly, we can apply appearance to components, bodies or individual faces, thus there are 3 different levels of appearance override. It’s a current limitation that the appearance override on bodies and components is not well supported if exporting to STEP. As I tried, only appearance assigned to individual faces will be kept.

Can Fusion native format (.f3d) satisfy the export purpose? The .f3d format would keep the appearance as expected. If the STEP (or IGES) format is a necessary, a workaround could be assigning appearance to individual faces, but it requires lots of drag and drop. (Using selection filter may reduce some effort, please refer to the screencast below)

Hope it helps.

[Pavel_Holecek]

Hello,

For material and appearance is important what format of CAD data you choose (SAT, STP, F3D,…) when you Export design. For Appearance and Fusion I recommended you to use F3D format (native Fuison 360 format). In case that you want to modify it in another CAD application then SAT format should work.  When you upload these CAD format back to Fusion then Appearance information  should be accepted.

regards

Pavel

[Anonymous]

You hit the nail on the head. Was attempting to export to STEP as it's the only format that I can import in the destination program that F360 will export.

So...to make certain I've got the gist. I have to assign an appearance to each face of every body in the entire assembly if I'm going to be successful exporting a STEP assembly?

That literally could be dozens (or hundreds as the model gets more complex) of individual faces that have to each be assigned independently?

Ahhhh...is the STEP export functionality on the short list for being addressed sooner rather than later?

[Anonymous]

Ok.  I've watched the video and I can see dozens of things that you are doing that I had not.  For instance, you are in Sculpt and I've never been there.

I will attempt to replicate what you've done in the video and see if that fixes the issue.

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

Solved.

Thank you very much.  A bit convoluted, but workable.

[NicolasXu]

Hi whtmountain,

Glad to know it's workable. Yes, the workaround is not so straightforward. The limitation is already in our backlog (ID: UP-8037), which will be prioritized among all the requirements for Fusion 360. I have added your case to the system, which will be helpful for the prioritization. 

Best Regards,