Applying existing appearance styles - Inventor Tutorial

- Appearance styles influence the way a part looks and allows users to organize them into specific libraries. What we're going to see here is that right now our part, if I were to select the front body you'll notice at the very top it shows up as dark grey. That dark grey is the default color right now for this assembly, what we want to do is maybe look at how we can change that, because of course that's going to influence what our rendering will look like. Later on we can even talk about how we can customize these and make very specific color changes. In order to make this change, I prefer myself to make the color changes not in the assembly file but actually in the part file itself. If I were right now to change this color it would allow me to do that. So if I pull down this long list of colors right here I would be able to change this to, say a yellow and you'll see it actually make the change. The problem is that you lose some control there because I don't have the option of changing the color of a face. Another issue with changing the color in the assembly file is that those changes are not reflected in the part file itself. What I'm doing by changing the color in the assembly is I'm overriding the color change in the part but if you looked at your part file it would still, it wouldn't be showing up as yellow, it would be showing up as that initial grey. We really don't want to do that. My preference is, instead of changing the color in the assembly file is to make sure that when you're making color changes, please apply them to the part itself. What I'm going to do here is undo our color change of yellow so we're back to that grey and what we're going to do is we're going to simply double click on the front body. That front body is going to now allow us to edit it and you'll notice when you did that everything else on the screen greyed out. Now we're actually looking at just the part file itself. What you'll notice is that there's different coloring options now, if you hover your cursor around the front body you're going to see that there's different faces, edges, all sorts of stuff that you weren't getting when you were in the assembly file. Now if I want to change the color you'll see that instead of just picking on the individual entire body I can select a face. If you did want to change the entire color, let's show you how to do that as well. If you go up at the very top of the ribbon here you're going to see a button for Adjust. I'm going to select that and this adjustment wheel pops up and it allows you to change colors. You can do this in a variety of ways. Anywhere you click your cursor you're going to be able to select colors. If I want to move down to a blue I could select that blue part of the wheel and then this allows me to kind of change the colors within that segment of color. If you wanted to select an individual face, you can see I get kind of an eyedropper, that would allow me to change the color of an individual face. If you kind of scrub around you'll notice that you've just got to catch it right but if you scrub around you can kind of catch the entire part. If I were to select that you would now be selecting the entire part and what's cool about that is once you've selected the part you're going to be able to see those color changes reflected live as you move them. If I make an adjustment, let's say you want to make this into kind of a red color, I can make that adjustment. Once you're happy with this you can individually select these colors, you can enter values if you want to but once you have the colors that you like you just simply click on the check mark and now that entire part has been changed in color. If I did want to click an individual face we can do that as well, I could again go up to the Adjust tab and I could select an individual face. Let's say I wanted to make this one more of a darker color, something like this. I can click that eyedropper, select an individual face and if I select that face I can click the check mark and now that face has changed color. So there's multiple different ways to change those colors but getting yourself set up in an environment so that you have the colors that you want. so that it's exactly what you want to look like in the final rendering is a big part of this process. It is very easy to change colors and patterns of parts to make them look more realistic in Inventor.