Hi Claudiu,
As far as I know ProE has not directly supported colours of parts as a variable.
[And yes I know I use the English spelling for colour]
From my understanding the most modern work around is to make a Material that has a colour property then assign the material to your part. I guess this means that if you use one type or grade of material (e.g. polypropylene) then you have to make a number of different coloured versions of this material. If you use lots of different materials then this gets quite cumbersome. Of course it is possible to have material files that are just for colour and with no real other values for the material. To deal with this I would think you would want family tables too.
Also you could use Inheritance models as a method of having coloured parts. The master part would be the most common colour or natural. Sub parts made using the master as the inheritance model could then be coloured as you want as the only thing you do before saving them.
An older work around was to make a surface offset of the solid part (with a very small value) then colour this surface offset. You needed an offset for each colour. Typically you would control these with a family Table. Of course there were problems with this method if you started to pick geometry with the coloured surface present you end up with errors due to the offset. You could still make drawings by having one instance (and usually the generic) with all the offset colour surfaces suppressed for use with dimensioning and adding an instance to the drawing for a shaded coloured image (and no dimensions).
Not sure if this helps and neither method is as easy as SolidWorks sounds for this aspect.
Regards, Brent
