2015 Appearances/Materials where used..how to delete

[mcgyvr]

So.... in my quest to understand/cleanup the madness that is appearances/materials now I've come across a new one and don't know how to fix it..

It "says" that appearance is being used by the following materials.. yet I have deleted those materials.. So I can't delete it..

What to do?

[jletcher]

Did you try and shut down Inventor and restart it? Worked for me...

 Some reason I think it holds it in someplace till then..

[jletcher]

Oh make sure you save the styles 1st

[mcgyvr]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Did you try and shut down Inventor and restart it? Worked for me...

 Some reason I think it holds it in someplace till then..

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Multiple times..

[ChrisMitchell01]

Were any of the materials you show there, renamed from the ones that are stated as being referenced ? Were the appearances you're trying to delete renamed from something else ?

Are you able to provide your .adsklib file please ?

Thanks,
Chris

[mcgyvr]

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@ChrisMitchell01 wrote:

Were any of the materials you show there, renamed from the ones that are stated as being referenced ? Were the appearances you're trying to delete renamed from something else ?

Are you able to provide your .adsklib file please ?

Thanks,
Chris

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Yes.. There probably was some renaming going on.. The reason I say "probably" is because I'm not 100% sure if I did rename or not. I've just been frantically deleting/modifying,etc... its a 100% work in process at this point..

Both my material and color library are in the link below (note: colors,etc.. are way off at this point because I've been messing with it SOO much to try to fix everything so if someone thinks thats a good library to use in their own projects you are WRONG.. 🙂 )

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9726802/Autodesk/Trimm%20Library.zip

Also Chris..What are the .xlf files and the .fbm folder that accompany the default Inventor material library.. I don't have any of those for my custom ones.. Should I ?

[ChrisMitchell01]

Thanks for the files; I'll ask someone in the dev team to see what those references actually relate to folloing renames, etc. It's not immediately apparent to me.....

Those additional files relate to how the contents of the library are "translated" for globalization purposes, so no you shouldn't have those for your custom library.

Thanks

Chris

[ChrisMitchell01 · Accepted solution]

OK - I think that we found the problem here. You have 2 .adsklib files, materials & appearances, but you have some material definitions stored in your appearance library. If you open your appearance library file, in the material browser, then there are several materials there too. If you search for those 3 material names in your appearance library, then you can find the offending 3 that are preventing you from deleting that appearance.

Is there a specific reason that you need 2 seprate files ? I think it would be much simpler to combine all materials & appearances in to a single adsklib file. The architecture of the adsklib file format was designed to support both material & appearance definitions.

Hope this helps,

Chris

[mcgyvr]

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@ChrisMitchell01 wrote:

Is there a specific reason that you need 2 seprate files ? I think it would be much simpler to combine all materials & appearances in to a single adsklib file. The architecture of the adsklib file format was designed to support both material & appearance definitions.

Hope this helps,

Chris

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I have 2 files because Inventor came with 2 files (Autodesk Appearance Library and Autodesk Material Library) so naturally when I set up my own I did it the same way thinking that surely Autodesk did it that way so we all should. I didn't see any documentation nor recommendation or valid reasons to only have 1 combined file. I'll go back through my libraries again and see if I can remove the materials from the appearance libraries. Hopefully that fixes the issue.

[mcgyvr]

yeah that fixed it..

Not sure how I got materials into my appearance library but they are ALL gone now and I can now delete the appearances I wanted.

Thanks Chris.

[freesbee]

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@ChrisMitchell01 wrote:

OK - I think that we found the problem here. You have 2 .adsklib files (...)

Is there a specific reason that you need 2 seprate files ? I think it would be much simpler to combine all materials & appearances in to a single adsklib file. The architecture of the adsklib file format was designed to support both material & appearance definitions.

Hope this helps,

Chris

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Environment: Inventor2015SP2 + Win7 (x64)

Since I exactly the same thinking as McGyver, I assumed that Materials.adsklib and Appearance.adsklib would have replaced the old Materials.xml and Colors.xml, each one doing its job without interferences. So I prepared my Appearances.adsklib with all appearances, and once that one was ready I created my Materials.adsklib with all materials, picking appearances from the Appearances.adsklib

My ultimate expectation was: "if I update one APPEARANCE for any reason, all Materials referred to THAT appearance will automatically update".

Apparently it doesn't work this way.

As a matter of fact I realized that each time a new material is saved to the Materials.adsklib file, its corresponding Appearance gets saved ALSO to the Materials.adsklib

This brought to the opposite situation: my Appearances.adsklib file doesn't have any Material, but my Materials.adsklib has a LOT of appearances, which of course ARE NOT the same as they are defined in the Appearances.adsklib

So my question would be: is there a way to FORCE all appearances to be ONLY in the Appearances.adsklib file while materials point them form the Materials.adsklib file or not?

Is anybody aware of a way to do this?

[dkohfeld]

If I get what you're saying...

How you should look at this is this:

- A Material has default Physical props and Appearance props.

- Materials always have a default Appearance (under Materials lib).  Walnut will always have a default walnut color/texture.

- Appearances (Appearance lib) is any treatment you apply to that material, ex. applying a stain or paint to that material.

I handle different libs, some are split and some are combined.  (I recommend combined and will be moving to split ones to this).  I have a bunch of steels and aluminums, all with default appearances and properties, in the Materials lib.  In the Appearances lib I have galvanizing and powdercoating and paint and other finishes we use.  This allows you to change feature appearance, like machining an anodized aluminum part.

[freesbee]

Yes, you got what I was saying.

As a matter of fact the answer to my final question appears to be "NO".

I hoped that Chris would also partecipate to this discussion giving us a final kind of official Autodesk answer on this point.

So it looks like that one material defined in FIRST.adsklib cannot exist WITHOUT its appearance also being defined in FIRST.adsklib

The problem arises if you have another appearance with the same name defined in your SECOND.adsklib

This behavior is definitely different from the old materials.xml and colors.xml structure that we had till the 2012 release, when one was defining materials and the other one was defining appearances. I'm sorry but at this point I don't see a reason to separate materials and appearances, because as soon as you will use one appearance defined in your SECOND.adsklib for one material, this will bring up a mess.

We have ~80 materials (none of them is standard) and ~120 appearances: our materials.adsklib is right now about 6 MBytes, which is still tolerable (with the xmls the same was done with 300 kbytes, but that's another story). Unfortunately no rumors come from Autodesk about changing/improving this part of the program, so we'll have to live with it (and the funny part is that 3DS people even blame the adsklib technology because it's too poor... it was really not needed!!  ).

[dkohfeld]

Don't think you're alone here.  I think most people struggled exactly how you are.  It takes some time in the beginning, but once it's done it is actually quite managable.

When you think you are linking an Appearance to a Material, you are actually just copying it.  If you create a Green Appearance and then link to Green in the Material editor, you are just copying over the values for that appearance.  If you go and edit the first Green Appearance, it remains its own variant and will not affect the Material Green.  You really should not have a Material>Appearance that is the same as an Appearance.  There are exceptions, but it depends on your needs.  We may use (Mat)Steel and (App)Galvanizing, but we may also purchase galvanized steel sheet and only use a (Mat)Steel, Galvanized with a built-in galvanized Material>Appearance.  If we only use the galv steel once in a while, I will just edit a Document Material; Otherwise, it goes in the Library.

There is no "problem" with how it's done now, just a problem with understanding how it's done.  AD didn't really explain it's usage well, and they certainly didn't help with the default multiple libs.

No, you don't need to create your Appearances first.  In fact, I would personally do them last.  What I did is finally bit the bullet and completely abandoned my old XML libs.  We have a different Material for many different ASTM steels, so I created one steel Material - A36 - with all the properties and appearances as I wanted them (don't forget to make the Material>Appearance name unique), and then I just duplicated, renamed Material, renamed Material>Appearance, renamed Material>Physical, and edited the physical props.

Get the names and labels in first and do it correctly!  Once you get the text in, you can always adjust the colors/textures later, now that you have everything defined independently.  All parts you open later will be updated using the "Update Styles" button.  Notice that when you double-click a Material to edit, it places it up top in the "Document Materials".  This is just a copy of what is in the Library, and you are only editing that copy.  You must drag it back down to save it to the Library, hopefully overwriting - otherwise you lose your associations.

Now do the same with Appearances;  make a "perfect" one, then copy it for all your variants, edit all your text, change color, etc.  Parts will also update if you change this later, with the same "Update Styles" button.

Note that you can open pre-2012 docs and drag the style into your current library.  I would strongly suggest you don't, as that was a major source of my frustration.  I now have a far greater respect and understanding of how the Library works because I started from scratch.

Hope this helps.

[dkohfeld]

I just re-read your post, and I think this will clear ti up some:

Make a Library with one Material (say, HDPE, White)

Give that a Material>Appearance something white and plasticy (We'll call it Plastic, White).

Create a new part and assign it HDPE, White.  You will see up in the Styles boxes that Material is "HDPE, White" and Appearance is "Plastic, White".

Anything else that you choose in the Appearance pulldown is considered an override (but you have none right now).

So you would only need to create an appearance for this if you needed to maybe dye it, in which case you would create something like "Dye, Red" and "Dye, Blue".  Picking that appearance will override the "Plastic, White" that is used by default Material.

But now you want to make black HDPE parts.  You do not make a new appearance, you make a new Material called "HDPE, Black" and make a new Material>Appearance called "Plastic, Black".  I know it doesnt' really work IRL, but now you can apply the same "Dye, Red" Appearance to "HDPE, Black" Material.

Of course, if you use many different black plastics, you probably don't want to use "Plastic, Black" for all of them (or maybe you do).  You would get more specific and create "Vinyl, Black" and "HIPS, Black", etc.  Keep in mind that you can also resuse Material>Appearances for different materials.  You would probably use the same Material>Appearance of Aluminum for all your 6061, 6063, 7075 Aluminum Materials.

[ChrisMitchell01]

It seems that most of the questions ahve been answered here, but since my name was mentioned specifially, I'd like to reiterate a few high level recommendations which have been made in various forum topics.

• If you're making any changes to materials/appearances then always save them to your own library - not the Inventor supplied ones.
• Only have a single custom library file (adsklib file) which contains both materials & appearances. There is no need to separate materials & appearances. This can be created by migrating legacy materials & colors.xml files or manually copying/pasting existing materials & then modifying them, or Manage, Save to take them from your part file to the library. Ensure to define this library in your Inventor project files, (& remove the Inventor/Autodesk libraries if you don't need them).
• If you change a material or appearance in the library & then use the Manage, Update command or Task Scheduler Update Design task, then all instances of that material/appearance should be updated; if they don't then either you have duplicate named materials/appearances in different libraries (or we have another problem).
• Consistent appearances across select Autodesk products will only really work if youuse the Autodesk libraries, (not guaranteed for Inventor libraries or custom).

Hope this helps,
Chris

[freesbee]

Thank you Chris: this was exactly what we needed.

Pity that it didn't came 2 years ago... 😉