Create a 'clearcoat' or 'see-thru' appearance?

[Anonymous]

Where I work, we use the 'appearance' to autofill our title blocks with a finish. We would like to be able to create a custom appearance that, for all intents and purposes, is clear (because we use this particular finish on multiple material types, which have different material appearances). We don't want to use the appearance to mask the material underneath, so just want to create a custom appearance that is see-thru, but don't want the part to be see-thru.

We aren't looking for yet another property to fill out in iProperties; we are trying to make this as simple-stupid as possible, as people seem to hate to have to add ONE MORE THING into iProperties.

I hope that makes sense.

In a nutshell; just want to create a custom appearance that will not truly have any appearance.  I am striking out and really hope that someone here can help.

[Cadmanto]

Why can't it be simply covered in a note?

Because I am thinking in order to accomplish what you are describing you would have to create an assembly with the coating being over the main part at a thin offset thickness.

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[mcgyvr · Accepted solution]

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@Anonymous wrote:

because we use this particular finish on multiple material types, which have different material appearances

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There is no way to have an appearance that does not effect the appearance.. 

You will need to come up with another workaround/method.. 

[Anonymous]

Because we want it to happen with an appearance change. That's why I'm asking. We have reasons to want to do it this way.

[Anonymous]

Okay, thank you. I appreciate the reply.

[Cadmanto]

Understood.  To my point about the assembly option.  The coating part would have the appearance you are asking for with its own appearance criteria with the main part underneath still being what it needs to be.

Just my 2 cents.

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[Anonymous]

How thick are we talking here? Is it even visible?

Typically I'd suggest just making the coating a virtual part and be done with it.

That's as simple as you can get.

I guess a picture of what you are looking for would help a lot.

But I'm thinking unless it's a pretty thick coating, like 1/4" or so, a virtual part would be the way to go.

Otherwise....the only other thing I can think of would be to create an envelope of sorts and set that material to a clear appearance.

Sorry, just trying to wrap my head around what you're attempting/needing.

[Anonymous]

"Where I work, we use the 'appearance' to autofill our title blocks with a finish."

Just wondering, what happens if someone uses the appearance override option? Or is that what you are having users do? From what I'm reading, you seem to have things set up to where it just makes things a lot more difficult for you and your users.

I can see having the Material property mapped to autofill, but Appearance and based on a coating?

As Cadmanto stated, you'd in essence have to create a part that encompasses the actual part that is an offset at the thickness of the coating and then have that material as clear to represent the coating as you'd like it. That's a ton of work for little to no value and the complete opposite of what you stated of making it "simple-stupid".

Again, post an example so we can try and figure out the best way to help.

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Edit - how about something along these lines...in the part model, add a user generated parameter of the Finish and then  just map the title block input to that parameter?

[tschaeferZNBXX]

Would it not be as easy to create a custom iProperty with the appearance?

You can then still drive your title block with this data.

[Cadmanto]

The OP stated he does not want to create any custom iproperties in his post.

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[blandb]

For all of your appearances, can you just choose an empty field to place the verbiage of your clear coat, then use ilogic or VB to pull that field to an iProperty? That way users dont have to worry about typing it in, but when they set the appearance the clear coat is already in a field, which is then pulled behind the scenes?

Just a thought...

[Anonymous]

I realize I haven't done a good job explaining what we are trying to accomplish.

We wanted a very easy way for our designers to assign both a material and a finish to each part.

First: the material is obviously very simple; Inventor has a material list that can be populated with our most-used materials, and this can then be linked to a "Material" field within the .idw environment.

Next, we were looking for a way to quickly and easily assign a finish to the part. A finish, in our case, doesn't necessarily mean a finish in the conventional sense; it COULD mean anodizing an aluminum part, it could mean deburring a UHMW part, or it could mean routing the edges of a poly carbonate part. So what we did was create custom appearances that would cover 95% of what we wanted to accomplish. (At this point, both the material and the appearance are being used to populate fields within the .idw).

Here is the problem: For example, we use the same "Routed Edges" finish on both black UHMW and on clear poly carbonate. When the appearance was created for "Routed Edges", we used a clear appearance because at first, we were only thinking about using that finish on clear poly and we didn't take into account that we also use that same finish on black UHMW. This is fine if we select that when creating a clear poly carbonate part, but if we assign the "Routed Edges" to a black UHMW part, you can see where the issue would be because the black UHMW part is no longer black. It is clear, because the appearance that was created to make a finish will apply to the part.

All of that being said, I understand fully that what we are doing is trying to use the appearance feature in a way that it wasn't intended to be used; it was just a quick way to try to assign a finish to a part and move on. I see now that I will probably just have to learn some VBA, create a finish dropdown dialogue, and have a list of finishes in it which will then populate a custom iProperty, which will then populate the corresponding .idw field.

Sometimes, it's hard to convey what is trying to be done and I apologize about that.

[Cadmanto]

Back to my note idea.  You said it would work, but you had so many it would make it difficult to change.

What if you created sketch symbols under the drawing resources in the drawing browser representing each material/finish combination and placed them as sketch symbols within the drawing formats.  The materials in the notes could even be linked such that they would grab the properties of the associated model.  This way each user could draw from a drop down list of which combination suits that particular circumstance.

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Intel i7-6700 @ 3.41ghz
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[Anonymous]

I believe we will go with the VBA route, at this point. I've been wanting to take some VBA classes anyway, so this will be a good impetus to get the company to pony up. In the meantime, we'll use a slightly cumbersome workaround.

I appreciate all of the replies; I thought an easy way to remedy this would be to be able to create an appearance that had no actual appearance tied to it.

[blandb]

In your template file, if you create a multi-value parameter called "Finish" and set all the required finishes. Next, create a rule such as what is show below. This will check the part to see if the finish is selected or not, if not, then the user is prompted to choose what they are looking for. The multi-value then gives your users a pull down list of finishes they can choose from that are independent of material and appearance and will automatically fill out the finish field. Now you can add this to your title block or parts list as need.

Hope that helps.

If iProperties.Value("Custom", "Finish")="" Then

iProperties.Value("Custom", "Finish")= InputListBox("Please Choose Finish", MultiValue.List("Finish"), Finish, Title := "Choose Finish", ListName := "Finish")

Else
iProperties.Value("Custom", "Finish")=Finish

End If