Appearance Conversion Confusion
Legacy Conversion in 2009 by Ron Bates
If you’ve found yourself struggling to understand how colors and textures from previous SolidWorks versions are converted into appearances in SolidWorks 2008 & 2009 you’re not alone. You might also be confused as to how the new appearances are shown in RealView and PhotoWorks as is the case with the posting at this Solidworks Discussion Forum thread. Ron Bates, Manager of Graphical Applications at SolidWorks has been kind enough to post a video explaining the process.
Rob,
I’m continually plagued by these problems. I don’t think it’s just SW users that are confused. I don’t think SW themselves have this problem completely wrapped up yet. Today I was working on a model for a render, saved it and reopened, and the appearances were seemingly randomly applied. What had happened was a Knit actually destroyed all of my split lines, and then the appearances didn’t know where to go. I still run into situations where I can’t remove an appearance, or the selection filters on the Appearance PropertyManager don’t work, or an appearance that has been removed shows up again after a different appearance is applied. I don’t understand how SW can explain this to users when there are some serious problems that remain with this appearances implementation two releases along. The colors functionality in 2007 at least worked predictably, even if some people were confused by it. When you have modeling bugs (the knit problem above) compounding the appearance application bugs, it’s difficult to have much confidence in what you do.
In response to Matt’s comment I am pleased to see that I am not alone in my frustration with the inconsistency of appearances. There is nothing more frustrating than asking the question at an open demo by a SW presenter about how to once and for all remove an appearance from a legacy part only to have them show exactly what you tried and have it work for them and not for you. My somewhat self depricating attitude leads me to believe I must have done something wrong along the way - maybe not! Rob, in your PhotoView 360 demo notes from SW World, you mention that the expected workflow is to apply appearances in SW and then do the final rendering in PhotoView 360. My expreience is that SW is too inconsistent in its application of appearances. Even though you lose several detailed controls, I almost always apply appearances in PhotoView 360 itself as the results are more consistent. I hope SW will address these inconsistencies soon as I’m tired of looking like a fool when I try to teach someone how to work with appearances and have it behave differently every time.