how to change material for components of linked designs

[Anonymous]

i'm using fusion 360 for photorealistic renders.

we manufacture custom pallet trucks, stackers and similar machines and sell parts of them to other manufacturers.

an item we've designed that has a good market is the tiller head.

our tiller head allows for a huge number of configurations and i want to do renders with f360 instead of taking pictures and post process them. at present, i need to do 15 renders (more will follow) and this would mean applying materials to every component of the head unit 15 times (most of all are the same and/or appear in many configurations). i can't apply materials in solidworks as they won't be inherited correctly in f360.

i've got a .step file of each of the 15 configurations of my tiller head.

a smart thing f360 does is that, when you apply a material to a component, all of the instances of that component in that design will inherit the same material.

this suggested that, if i put all of my head units in the same "design" (to use f360 names), i could apply materials just once and have all the head units get them at a time. that would have saved a lot of (my) time.

unfortunately, it seems to me that you can start a new design from a .step file, but cannot include a new .step file in an already-existing design. or, at least, i couldn't find a way to do it.

that's why i've created a new design from each step file and ended having 15 designs in f360.

i've created a 16th empty design, rotating the view as i wanted it to be and setting current view as home (i can't find a way to export and import named views as well... i'm sorry, i'm a total beginner and i'll appreciate any help).

3rd step: i included in the empty design 2 head unit designs; and that worked: i see 2 head units, move them one close to the other and the included designs show a sort of "chain" icon close to their names.

however, at this point i cannot apply materials to components of these designs as they're referenced into other designs and are locked.

is there a way i can change materials of components of designs which have included into the present design?

another solution to my problem would be: is there a way to add a second (or third or whatever) .step file into the present design? (this would be helpful, too, for other situations)

is there a way to export and import named views between designs, so that i could achieve the very same point of view to all of my head unit designs? (this would be very helpful for complete machines as well).

in solidworks you can navigate viewport with arrow keys: starting from right view, for example, you press 2 times left arrow key and 1 time up arrow key and get to a view which isn'tn isometric nor any other standard view, but that could be okay and is reproduced easily in each design. rotating the viewport with the mouse makes it impossible to get to the same view in different designs.

thank you in advance, for your time and attention.

[jeff_strater · Accepted solution]

@Anonymous, thanks for posting.  Your description is clear.  A quick answer for now, then I'll follow up with a video in a bit.  For your materials question, Fusion supports two types of materials:  physical material, and "appearance" (cosmetic material).  If appearance is OK for your usage (for rendering, it should be OK, I hope), then yes, you can apply appearance to linked designs, if you apply to the Component, not the Body (which is the default).

For exporting Saved Views, I'll have to think about that one on my commute to work.  Offhand, I can't think of a way to do this, but there might be some trick...

Jeff

[Anonymous]

"Appearance" would be fine, as i'm interested only in the way components look in renders.

i've selected the "render" workspace, opened the "appearance" window (hotkey A), chose a material and drag'n'drop it onto a component.

i've got a warning message stating that:

"This component has appearances assigned to bodies or faces, they cannot be removed because they are in a referenced component. The appearance you are applying will not have any effect to them".

i think it's useful, at this point, add that i haven't applied any appearance (in f360) to any of these components and that the colours (and, eventually, physical materials and/or appearances) have ben inherited somehow from solidworks' step file (where we give colours to components to better recognize them, but nothing more than that).

i hope this helps helping me 🙂

by the way: the appearances dialog window is not in the above screenshot as i'm working on a triple head workstation and it's in another monitor. i cropped the above screenshot to make it a bit narrower and better fit the window in this forum, making it (hopefully) easier to see and read.

[jeff_strater]

Here is a video that explains materials and appearances, and external references.  Hope it helps

[jeff_strater · Accepted solution]

looks like our posts crossed.  Here is another video explaining that warning that you get:

Regarding "inserting a STEP file into a design", the only real way to do this is to do exactly as you have done:  upload the design, then use Insert Into Design to create an external reference, then use Break Link on that reference to copy the data locally: