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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?
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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.
Yes this is supported.
Set the appearance and assign material per body
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.
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.
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.
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.