Vers 2013 - Edit apperance library (I Think)

[Anonymous]

Just got upgraded to version 2013 by IT.  Seeing that AD still can't maintain consistency from vers to vers.  This version replaced 'Color Styles" with 'Appearances'.   But, not just appearances, you have Document Appearances, the Autodesk Material Libray, the Autodesk Appearance Library, and the Inventor Material Library.

Why would the Material libraries show up when clicking the Appearances button when there is another button right beside it to get to Materials.

I mean, who is really going to use several dozen different types of flooring.  And why is some metal in the metal category and some in default Category.  And then some is in the metal Type and some in the generic Type.  Is there really a need for two fields for organizing 'appearances' ?    If this were a graphical design program I couls see some of this but it is a cad program.  Seems like a case of trying to tailor one product to too many markets.

To the question.  How do I unlock the Autodesk Appearance Library so I can get rid of all the junk I don't need and add some really obvious ones that are not there.

[adam.nagy]

Hi,

If you are only using Inventor from Autodesk then this change might look strange. It was introduced to provide consistency between the products. Now AutoCAD, Revit, etc are all using the same material/appearence libraries so you can use the exact same materials in multiple products and when moving models from one product to the other they should stay/look exactly the same.

It looks like Materials and Appearences are different, but they can reside in the same libraries: http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/Autodesk-Inventor/Single-library-for-BOTH-Material-and-Appearance/td-p... 

I think you'll have to change things in the "Inventor Material Library" which is not locked. 

Might be worth asking about things like these in the Inventor product forum as well.

Cheers,

[Anonymous]

I did some research and figured most of that out.  I onlu asked here as it seemed to be a customization topic as opposed to a modeling / drawing topic.

I understand the resoning but it would have been nice to have incoporated the existing Inventor only styles into the main library instead of having to deal with multiple libraries.  In other words, put all the data into a single location and let me edit it to my needs.