Surface Bodies Should Be Able to Use Part Appearance

[b_ruijter]

Currently, surface bodies in Inventor cannot take the appearance of the part material or appearance. Instead, they are limited to Application Surface Color or a manually assigned appearance.

Please add an option that allows surface bodies to automatically inherit the part’s appearance, similar to solid bodies. This would greatly improve visual consistency, especially in workflows that rely heavily on surface modeling.

Additionally, it should be possible to override this appearance at a higher assembly level, just like with solid bodies.

This functionality feels like an obvious and long-overdue improvement and would remove an unnecessary limitation in surface-based design workflows.

[b_ruijter]

Autodesk should extend the appearance inheritance system so that surface bodies can reference the part-level appearance, similar to solid bodies.

Currently, surface bodies bypass the part appearance entirely and rely only on Application Surface Color or manual overrides.

Additionally, feature appearance settings for surface features are exposed in the UI but are not consistently applied, which indicates an incomplete implementation.

Surface bodies should participate in the same appearance hierarchy as solid bodies, including assembly-level overrides.