Appearances in Multibody parts

[Carguy131313]

Is it possible to propagate an appearance, defined in a multibody part, down to a dependent part defined by one of the bodies?  For example lets say you have a surface and you want to shade it with two different colors in order to communicate two different textures to a mold maker.  If this is done in the multibody part can it be propagated down to the dependent parts?

[tbraxton]

Yes this is supported.

Set the appearance and assign material per body

https://support.ptc.com/help/creo/creo_pma/r7.0/usascii/index.html#page/whats_new_pma/multibody-injection_molded_material_parts.html# 

Support for Multibody Parts in Data Exchange:

Body characteristics, such as body name and body appearances, are transferred

Note that you will need the proper license for some features when using data exchange. 

[Carguy131313]

Hello tbraxton,

Thanks for the reply.  Can you elaborate a little on second statement above, "Body characteristics, such as body name and body appearances, are transferred".  The transferring of the body name is pretty straight forward but I do not see how to consistently transfer the body appearance.  I was kind of hoping that if a created a named appearance in the view manager that this same appearance would be available in the child part.

Thanks in advance.

[tbraxton · Accepted solution]

I believe that you are referring to an appearance state. If you create an appearance state in your model and then use the create part from body option to make a derivative part then the newly created part should have the appearance state that was active on the body when you created the part.

Here is an example:

The blue and yellow surfaces are part of an appearance state created in the source part.

The derivative model created using Body 1 above created with the appearance state 1 active:

The blue and yellow surfaces are carried over as seen below.

I believe this appearance is persistent in the derivative model and is not parametric with the source part. If you are asking how to make the appearance of a part derived from a body then you will have to ask PTC support.  Appearance states are not copied over to a part derived from body as described above.

[Carguy131313]

Okay, thank you for the clarification.  I was hoping there was a way to maintain the appearance state in the multibody part and have it parametric to the derived part but at least now I have the answer.