Applying materials - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

The look and feel of materials in Solidworks is the cornerstone of rendering. Solidworks has a nice library materials to choose from and we can modify those existing materials to suit our needs. There are two ways to apply material to parts. First, let's apply a base material from the Feature Tree. And secondly, we'll add an appearance to the individual parts or assembly. To get started, let's go ahead and click on either File > Open or Click on the Open icon on the top of the screen. We're going to open up TI-WD1-20. Make sure we're choosing an assembly. We can choose it from the Quick Filter here. By choosing Assembly. And go ahead and click OK. Click on Open. So you can see the individual parts we have here, or listed on the left, that make up this assembly. And none of these really have any appearances or materials applied to them. So we want to go ahead and open each one of those, and apply a material that'll show up here in the assembly view. We can also then add appearances on top of those materials to modify the individual faces, bodies, or features. To get started, let's click on the case of the watch. And go ahead and click on Open Part. And you can see there, that'll open up in View. Once I have that selected, I can go ahead and click on material over here on the left. And if you right click on that, you get an icon that says edit material. And click on that. Then inside of here we get a bunch of different materials we can choose from all the way from steel, to iron, titaniums, plastics, to other materials. You name it, pretty much everything is available in here or if it's not, we can add our own custom materials. To get started though, let's look at a few different options. In this case here, I want to add in titanium, so I'm going to choose this one here, which is called TI-3AL8V. And I'm going to apply that material. Notice it shows up over here as Applied. And I'm also going to add it over here to Favorites. So I come over here to the end, I click on Favorites. Then click on Add. (SOUND) Should actually already be here at the bottom. If you didn't have it added in already. And then also, under Appearance, you can see how this is going to show up. So right now it's showing up as a Satin Finish Titanium. And I can apply this, or I can change that, if I needed to. But I'm just going to use the basic one. So I go ahead and click on Close. And you notice that the appearance of the part did change. It's now kind of like a light grayish color. Versus the color it was before and so you can see it change. If I go back to the assembly, you can see that part does have a different appearance than the rest of them and its been applied. I can do the same thing now with the other components. For instance, this component here, click on the top, click on open part then come over here and apply finish. Now I click on material, and if I right click on it, notice that titanium shows up at the bottom of my list of favorites, so I can just click on that, and it quickly applies it. It's a really quick way to go ahead and add materials to individual parts once you've chosen the first one. Add to your favorites and keep adding it to the other components, as long as they're all the same component. Click okay, click on save. Come back to that top level assembly again. Now this component here is a little strange cause it's actually transparent, it's glass. We're going to be looking through. Because it's transparent right now. Actually it's harder to select. So one secret to get around this is we hold in the shift key, it allows me to pick that top face and I can click on open part. So there's the piece, and under materials here, I don't want to choose titanium for this one so I'm going to go back to edit material, come down here, you're looking for other materials and coming down to glass. Choose glass and look at the appearance. Note clear glass, but we can also change it to blue glass or green grass or any of these other ones here if you wanted to. And apply that material and click okay. And you can see we've got a kind of a look of glass and it looks exactly how it would look like. Click on save and come back to the model. We got a few other items here we need to add materials to, we need to add materials to the winder, to the individual hands as well as the inlay of the back of the watch. There are several ways to apply materials in Solidworks, and several more ways to modify the look. Materials can be applied on the part level, or assembly level. So let's get started and apply all the materials to our parts and assemblies and start rendering.