topic Re: Appearance Mngr surface selection in 3D Part & Assembly Design

Appearance Mngr surface selection

BurtLand — Sun, 13 Dec 2020 04:04:56 GMT

How do you select SOLID SURFACES in WF5 within the Appearance Mngr tool ? Its not on right button.To do this now you have to do it before using the tool.

Re: Appearance Mngr surface selection

pwyndham — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 16:45:17 GMT

I think the actual Appearance Manager is only for setting up the colors and appearances.

Here is a screenshot of the AppearanceManager:

To apply the colors use the icon on the tool bar Called Appearance Gallery.

Select a color from the My Appearances list:

Then, select the surfaces with the paintbrush, hold the control key to select more than one surface:

Hit Ok on the Select dialog box:

When in the selection mode you can right click to cycle the selection to other surfaces or the whole part.

Re: Appearance Mngr surface selection

BurtLand — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 09:09:35 GMT

Your last comment is the crux of it ...

In the paintbrush mode you can select surfaces one at a time, or you can right click to cycle the selection to other surfaces or the whole part but there is no SOLID SURFACES option which should paint ALL the surfaces.

Being able to paint the PART and paint SOLID SURFACES is fundamental to how ProE (used to) works. To do this in WF5 you have to select the SOLID SURFACES outside the tool and pull them into the tool to paint them. Or am I missing something?

So much for Object-Action Action-Object functionality. Its an interesting oversight and indicates how little the architect of this tool understands its use !

Re: Appearance Mngr surface selection

chris5 — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 11:02:53 GMT

When you select the appearance and then in the model tree the part you want to change it works perfect for all the surfaces of the selected part.

Simple and perfect.

Regards

Chris

Re: Appearance Mngr surface selection

BurtLand — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 21:57:26 GMT

Sorry but it doesnt - it just changes the PART colour.

None of the surface collection techniques work either (Shift- Click) and UNDO doesnt work - how this tool ever got released is beyond me.

Just so you dont think Im crazy, as I understand it there are two colouring concepts in ProE

the PART which is the complete solid lump and includes all the parts interior and
surfaces including SOLID SURFACE which is just the complete exterior surface.

The edges (if turned on) follow the PART colour - well in WF4 they did but thats now somewhat broken in WF5 as well.

You may well ask whats the point of this ...

When working with castings you colour the PART one colour and the SOLID SURFACE (all external surfaces) a different colour. As you apply machining features to the cast part the interior is revealed in the PART color - you can automatically distinguish surfaces that are cut and those that arent. You can also use this feature to change the edge colour, as they follow the PART colour.

Very cunning stuff - another example of the genius behind some of the madness in ProE

Unfortunately the guys that have re-done this interface havent understood these subtilities, nor the basic interface conventions .... Project Lightning could be interesting

complex and imperfect but thats ProE

Re: Appearance Mngr surface selection

pwyndham — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 13:49:44 GMT

OK, I get it now. I guess I always manually colored the cut surfaces. Now, I see that your way is better (much easier and less apt to missing a surface.

Cool learned a new trick.

Re: Appearance Mngr surface selection

GregFrankland — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 14:47:27 GMT

I agree that the RMB button probably should be added to select Solid Surfaces. I did get it to work using the search function (binoculars). It was a bit laborious so I created a mapkey so that after you select the color you want you can type `q and then it will automatically select all of the surfaces in the model which seems to do what you are looking for. Please let me know if this helps.

(The mapkey can be found in the attached file.)

Thanks,

Greg

Re: Appearance Mngr surface selection

Patriot_1776 — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 20:54:38 GMT

Where did the "from model" ability go? Was it deleted as an "enhancement"?