Warning when attempting to assign appearance to parts

[Anonymous]

Hello, 

I recently got Fusion 360 to assemble a robot for my schools robotics team. I am attempting to model build a robot using .prt files that I downloaded online; I have tried to assign certain parts a new appearance to make the robot look more colorful, but an error appears:

The error is shown in the bottom right and corner. I attempted to give on of the parts a polished brass appearance

"The 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."

When I click on the "More Info" link, nothing appears. I would really like to have these colors on the robot by the end of the week. If anyone knows how I can get rid of this error and begin to change the appearance of these parts, could you please help me? If any other information is needed, feel free to ask and I will supply it to the best of my abilities. 

Thanks so much!

Richard Bowman

[jeff_strater]

The problem here is that the components you are referencing have appearances applied on the bodies in components which are referenced in your design.

In Fusion, you can apply an appearance either to a body, a component, or to individual faces.  In your case, it looks like it was applied to a body.  Body appearance is not an overridable attribute in a top-level assembly.  Component appearance can be overridden.  To fix this:  Open up the component(s) which have this problem, and remove appearance override from those bodies.  Then, you should be able to change the color in the top-level assembly without this error.

I will record a screencast showing the problem, how to  fix it, and how to avoid it in the future, and post it shortly.  I admit that this aspect of Fusion is overly complex...

Jeff

[jeff_strater · Accepted solution]

I apologize for the delay, I had some problems recording the screencast, then got distracted by some other issues.  Here is the screencast:

[Anonymous]

Thank you so much! Very helpful and very clear.

[Anonymous]

Thank you Jeff, I was having the same issue where I had brought in a number of parts of a hinge from a manufacturers site. I assembled the parts and then tried to change the appearance and had this same issue and error popping up Once I went into the individual parts I could delete the pre assigned materials and then do what I needed.

Many Thanks

Dean