how to change material of components of included "designs"?

[Anonymous]

i'm using fusion 360 for photorealistic renders.

many of my assemblies share a lot of components.

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.

considering this cool auto-feature, if i could put all of my assemblies in the same "design" (to use f360 names), i could apply materials just once and have all the instances of the components in all the assemblies get them at a time. that would save a lot of 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. is there a way? can you help me with this?

after creating, say, 15 designs for each assembly, i've created a 16th empty design, rotating the view as i wanted it to be and setting current view as home. 2nd question is: is there a way to export/import named views?

3rd step: i "included" in the empty design 2 designs; and that worked: i see 2 assemblies, 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?

there a way to add a second (or third or whatever) .step file into the present design?

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.

gianni.

[TrippyLighting · Accepted solution]

The chain icon indicates they are linked assemblies/components. You'll have to open that linked assembly and then. change the appearance materials there. Then every design that you've linked these design into will automatically update to show those appearances.

I don't think there's a way to share named views across designs, but you can create yourself a template file that has all these vies that you need and then start building you assemblies always using that template.