Appearance Hierarchy

I wrote about colors a couple of weeks ago. Colors are great to assist visualization. But there are some technical details regarding how you implement the use of colors in a CAD assembly that aren’t obvious. You see a lot of questions of people asking about applying some color to a model and the color doesn’t stick, or is applied, then goes away, or they open an assembly with the part in it, and the color is suddenly different. I love stuff like this where people start believing in either bugs or supernatural powers associated with CAD. Now don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of bugs associated with certain CAD packages, but not nearly as many as some people believe.

Here’s the deal with colors, and “appearances”:

There is a hierarchy for applying (or seeing, removing, etc) colors, textures, and other visual characteristics. By “hierarchy”, I mean the higher your selection is on this list, the more likely the appearance will show (unless there is another appearance applied to something even higher on the list). Here it is, from highest priority to lowest:

• Assembly (if you assign an appearance to the assembly, it overrides all other appearance options)
• Component (a component is a part or subassembly selected in an upper level assembly)
• Face (doesn’t matter if the face is selected in the part or assembly)
• Body
• Feature
• Part (where the appearance is assigned in the part window, or specifically applied to the part level in the assembly)

If you assign appearances via context menu, you will see this selection that shows there are several levels of appearances applied to this part. The yellow block with blue block means that there is a component level appearance (green). There is also a body level (yellow) and part level (pink). If you want to remove all of these color overrides, you can click the bottom option.

You can also access override options from the Display Pane as shown here:

In this screen capture, there has been a color applied to the Gear Box assembly. The Remove Appearance options here are very powerful. You can remove this assembly level appearance, or any component level appearances using the other options.

My favorite way to manage colors, erm, excuse me, appearances is to use the Display Pane. Press F8 to make it appear/disappear, and you can see parts, components, features, bodies which have color or appearance settings. You can also see hide/show state, wireframe/shaded, and transparency of parts as well as part/component appearances. The Display Pane is powerful in both parts and assemblies. If you mess with colors and don’t use this, you’re really missing out.

The one thing you can’t see with this is face colors. Adding faces to be tracked in the Display Pane would really simplify a lot of things, but I’m not holding my breath for that one. I’ve suggested it long ago.

The Appearance PropertyManager is shown here to the right. You can use this interface to apply appearances at any level, using the selection filters to pick what you want to change (only one filter works at a time). Notice also the Remove All Appearances. This will set all parts in an assembly back to default color. If you have a single part selected, the option will be somewhat different, and will remove all appearances from that component (and apply default gray).

So if you’re really lost with colors, you can come back to the Color PropertyManager and reset everything. And if you get all messed up with the use of “color” and “appearance”, don’t worry, I think the whole “appearance” change was a terminology mistake. This could have been much simpler.