The ability to change the appearances, colors, textures, shadows, etc. seems to be extremely well thought out and highly capable of producing some extremely high quality renderings and details.
For some of us, though, we have neither the time nor the inclination to go down the rabbit hole of these extremely robust controls. Some of us use inventor for modeling/design of all steel parts to ultimately produce 2D black/white fabrication drawings only and will never use these extensive features. For those of us in this group, the ability to quickly and easily change one part in an assembly to green and another part to red for contrast while modeling, Inventor is an absolute nightmare. All 50 parts in my assemblies are the same material and thickness so I just want to be able to see different colors for contrast.
I've been using Inventor for 8 months now (NX for 8 years before that) and this whole appearance library thing is still VooDoo magic to me. I've turned off textures, I've created a custom appearance library, and I've fumbled through being able to make colors change parts but not consistently and with a thorough understanding of why things do what they do. I'm not sure why something so simply HAS to be so complicated. I understand that some users NEED these features and the seem to be really nice but man is it cumbersome.
I would like to recommend a "Simplify Display Options" selection that disables all the "fancy" color/appearance options and just allows adjusting colors in much more basic way. Click on a part, change the color. Select multiple parts, change the color for all selected parts at once.
Thank you.
