Managing Appearance States of Subcomponents

[Greg_H]

Creo 5.0.4

Let's say I have an assembly "W".  In the default appearance state, all the subcomponents are grey & in a new appearance state, lets call it "ASW1", all the subcomponents are various colors.

Now let's say I have an assembly "A" which contains assembly "W".  The default appearance state for assy "A" uses the default appearance state for assy "W".

I want to create a new appearance state for assy "A" that uses assy "W" appearance state ASW1.  How do I do this?

[Greg_H]

Bumping because I'm still looking for an answer.

Rephrasing the question, if I have a part with appearance stats "Blue", "Green" and "Red" and I use the part in the assembly, how do I determine which appearance state the part will be in?  If I want to create multiple appearance states in the assembly, how to I select and change the part appearance state?

[sacquarone · Accepted solution]

Hello @Greg_H 

This specific workflow is unfortuntakley not supported yet. We officially document this in article 259759.

• Regarding this limitation, PTC Product Manager is aware of this buisness need, and owns currently one enhancement request (internal PTC reference) formulated as follows:

Provide the ability for Part appearances to be used in new assemblies that use that part and allow the configuration to be saved.

Appearance states defined at part or sub-assembly level cannot be applied and saved in top assembly in Creo Parametric.

Steps to reproduce :

- Create a new part with an extrude feature

- Create one or two appearances states in this part different from the master appearance

- Create a new assembly > Assemble the previously created part

> Appearance states defined in part cannot be used inside assembly.

> Part can be opened in session, appearance state can be applied to part at part level and is then displayed in assembly in same session. But this configuration can never be saved. 

• This enhancement request is still pending, so that we have currently no visibility when it will be available, and  cannot provide any comittment so far that it will be implemented, 

Considering above limitation, your next quetion may be: what are the options then to achieve this in an alternate way?

=> There is so far no known "robust way" to achieve this, but following alternate approach may help:

• Consider material assignment in part, as material can store also appearance and color preconfigured (refer to article 43839 for technical details)
• Consider then usage of Family Table driving differen material assignments in part instances
• Use then Assembly Family Tables calling the Part Instances of Part Family Tables
• This technique:
  • is documented in article 33983
  • Above article provides a way to achieve this, but has nevertheless also limitations (all documented in the article), based on what is present in session upon asm instance retrieval

Last question you may have is as follows: Ok. clear to me now that I cannot drive parametrically the apperance state of my top asm, based on appearance states defined in my components/sub assemblies. But can I "at least":

1. Retrieve an appearance state existing in a given sub-asm/component
2. And set it as "Default Appearance" in order to ensure it will be retrieved with this level of color definition when I will retrieve my top assembly later?

Answer: Yes. This is possible, and can be achieved as shown in little movie attached. I'm afraid we cannot provide much more due to current limitations documented above.

Regards,

Serge