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Pro ENGINEER Wildfire 4.0: Appearance Editor

ptc-5436738
1-Newbie

Pro ENGINEER Wildfire 4.0: Appearance Editor

Hey everybody!

 

So I recently got a project assigned where I must design a calculator. Now while the modeling and such is quite fine, I find the Appearance Editor (adding colors and such) quite confusing. Especially Asignments.

 

Under the tab Asignments there seems to be a drop down menu of multiple selections. Part, Surface, All Surfaces, Quilt, Objects, etc. From what I understand that is how the program knows what you want to be colored. Part being the whole .prt file, surface being selective surfaces, and so on.

 

However, I am currently stuck on attempting to color the buttons on my calculator individually. As in, I want to color my buttons a different color than my base calculator. (Ex: I want my calculator to be black, but my buttons to be white) However, I can't seem to do this without selecting the surfaces one by one (which will take a while, being that there are more than 10 surfaces per button, with over 40 buttons. Is there any way I can do this any faster?

 

Quite new to ProE in general so excuse my ignorance but is there a way you can color things filed in a certain Extrude? As in, color only objects that were extruded on "Extrude 1" or "Extrude 2"? If not, is there a way to separate the objects from the whole calculator itself so that while it looks like the buttons are part of the calculator file, it is simply a merge between the button files and the calculator file. Sorry if that made no sense, I just think I remember talk about that somwhere.

 

Thanks!


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5 REPLIES 5

They did make it a little better in Creo by adding "intent surface" but even that doesn't help much since it acts on features where now you have to separate the features when they are common. It doesn't even recognize patterns.

Have you thought of just making the calculator an assembly? Now you can select the object at the part level.

I assume that your calculator isn't an assembly? If it was, you simply open each button and apply a color to them.

You can use a "Seed and boundary" selection. You pick a "seed" surface in the middle of the surfaces you want, then you hold shift and pick a ring of surfaces, creating a "boundary" around that surface. These are the surfaces that you DON"T want at the edge of those you DO want.

For example, if I wanted to pick all the surfaces inside a swimming pool, I'd pick the bottom of the pool as my seed, hold shift, and pick all the surfaces that ring the top edge of the pool. Creo would then pick all the surfaces in between.

The trick is making sure you get a complete loop as your boundary or else it will "leak" and pick the entire model.

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Doug Schaefer | Experienced Mechanical Design Engineer
LinkedIn

Is the "Seed and Boundary" selection part of making my calculator an assembly? As in, to do that selection type do I have to make my calculator an assembly first?

Does sound quite simple though, but if I were to select the very surface (front) of the buttons, and start dragging the boundary down INTO the calculator, would it select the calculator as well?

What do you mean by a complete loop?

Seed and boundary is a method of selecting part surfaces for a variety of purposes, in your case, for applying a color.

As Steven explained below, there are many types of objects in Proe, in general mimicking he real world. A real calculator is made up of an assembly of many parts, you typically would build each part in proe and assemble them together in a proe assembly. There are methods of top down design where you can build the parts within the assembly, but that's pretty advanced. best to master parts & assemblies separately first.

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Doug Schaefer | Experienced Mechanical Design Engineer
LinkedIn

How do you make an assembly? I'm relatively new to ProE so not too sure how to do a large amount of things. What do you mean at part level?

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