Best place to save custom appearance texture (.jpg) image files

[oliver.tilbury]

Hi All,

I’m looking for some guidance please on where and how best to save (and settings to set within Inventor) for custom appearance texture image files. In my case these are .jpg files.

I have created custom appearances with my own texture images so I can get things looking as I wish.

Here is what I have done to date:

I have a custom .adsklib material library saved in my custom Design Data folder within my main Templates folder directory where these custom appearances and materials are saved:

I then have a separate folder outside of this where I have my .jpg image files saved, again in my main Templates folder location:

This all works great – until it doesn’t.

The problem:

Sometime when working on new projects and copying files, or opening files (not 100% sure on what is and is not triggering the issue) I’m getting ‘Resolve Link’ dialogues pop up (usually when opening files that have been copied, be that from within the project or from my main Templates folder, i.e. standard parts):

I’m also getting (always) a message popping up when using Design Assistant that says “The following (#) files contain OLE links which will not be updated as part of the selected action.”:

I know the default Appearance texture files that Inventor uses are saved in:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Autodesk Shared\Materials\Textures

However I don’t want to save my custom image files there as these will inevitably get lost in the future as software gets uninstalled / re-installed or computers change etc.

I.e. it seemed sensible to me save my custom texture images files within my main templates directory as this is a central shared location and is the thing that will be carried over and used from release to release.

I do know that there is this setting in the Application Options but not sure if this pertains to appearance image files as the image files in there are limited and not 100% sure in fact where Inventor uses these:

Hope that all makes sense.

Any advice would be hugely appreciated!

Thanks in advance,

Oliver

[oliver.tilbury · Accepted solution]

Thanks @johnsonshiue.

I don't feel like I'm going quite so crazy now! 😂

Seems like a less than ideal solution though to copy the files from %PUBLICDOCUMENTS%\Autodesk\Inventor %RELEASE%\Textures into my custom texture library folder (C:\Users\Public\Documents\Autodesk\SL Custom Textures).

I don't really want to muddy what should be a nice tidy folder of just the custom texture .jpg files with a load of other gubbins (files!)! 

So instead, I have now reverted Tools -> App Options -> File -> Texture back to %PUBLICDOCUMENTS%\Autodesk\Inventor %RELEASE%\Textures and instead am trialling adding my custom texture folder path as a workgroup to the Project settings ↓:

So far this is not throwing any error messages! 🤞

So currently my best work flow / conclusion is:

1) Keep Tools -> App Options -> File -> Texture with the default location of %PUBLICDOCUMENTS%\Autodesk\Inventor %RELEASE%\Textures

This is so no unexpected issues are run into with how Inventor uses these files for section view, background,  shading ect.

2) Place custom texture files (in my case .jpg files) in a generic and replicable folder path so that this can be replicated on any machine. I have chosen to place this folder in C:\Users\Public\Documents\Autodesk on the basis that this path should always be the same no matter the release of Inventor installed nor the machine (i.e. avoiding having a specific user name within the path address). This should greatly reduce the change of the absolute texture file paths in the Appearance Editor becoming broken. 🤞

3) Add this custom texture folder path as a Workgroup Search Path in the Project settings

Hopefully this is a robust solution but I guess I wait to see as I continue to work and see if any unexpected issues do still arise. I dearly hope not!

Also the above conclusions might be useful to others encountering a similar issue and not being able to find good advice on workflows for handling custom appearance texture files.

Thanks

[johnsonshiue]

Hi Oliver,

I am very sorry if my prior replies sounded a bit callous. The behaviors are indeed confusing. This discussion has been going on for more than 10 years. Unfortunately, the best I can offer is to explain the behaviors. The change required to make it work like in Inventor 2012 in this case is much bigger than Inventor team can manage.

You did not do anything wrong. If I was not involved in the project back in the days, I would have hard time understanding the behaviors also.

Many thanks!

[oliver.tilbury]

Thanks @johnsonshiue.

I think explaining the behaviour as if it was water tight is where you lost me! 😀

If there was a check box next to the texture path in the Appearance Editor along the lines of 'Texture path as per Project' and then you could have a new line under the Folder Options in the Project settings where you could either put a by project texture path or set it to =[Default] to take the path as set in the Application Options.

I have no idea how hard this would be to implement through so easy for me to say! 

Thanks again.

[johnsonshiue]

Hi Oliver,

Unfortunately, no, there is no such thing. The issue here is that the material styles and appearance styles are managed by a shared component common to all Autodesk products. This component manages the styles in an absolute-path basis. Inventor is just one of the Autodesk products consuming the shared component.

Many thanks!

[oliver.tilbury]

Ok. Fair enough. Was worth a go! 😀

[CadUser46]

Oliver, if it helps i have always copied everything from publicdocuments into a folder on share, add my custom ones, then pointed my app options to that folder.

I'm not saying it's right and i find it equally confusing (literally found this thread while trying to grasp my own issue).

It might be nice if autodesk renamed app options to 'Custom Texture Folder'.

I also have a case where one specific texture is hard coded to a path, regardless of what app options says.  The rest seem to honour the app option path.