Inventor 2013 introduced a new way of working with materials that has been met with some criticism. Mostly due to the fact that you need SP1.1 to really start using them effectively in a group dynamic, but also that users with an IT staff with the idea that an upgrade is as simple as install and uninstall run into problems when they don't properly migrate the color styles to the new appearance libraries. Say what you want about the new material settings in Inventor, but this tool for adjustment is really handy.
So lets frame a common problem, here we have a part that has been designed, but the overall color, the face override colors, the grain direction, and the scale of the texture mapping are all off from what we really want.
Start the Adjust command from the Quick Access Toolbar or the Tools Tab. With this little dial you can change color at will on any face or the entire body if you want. You can choose to define color manually with the wheel here or by input for RGB or HSL colors.
To start changing individual faces you must first dip your eyedropper on a face color and then it will turn into a paint bucket. This paint bucket will change the color of any face you click on. Make sure you hold down SHIFT if you want to do more than one face application at a time.
When the body is selected you get additional controls for texture scale and primary direction. The red box below shows controls for overall Texture Scale and the blue box is a control for texture mapping orientation. The scale is really handy if your texture was larger or smaller than what you had in mind for you part or component.
The Texture mapping selector will be available when the body is selected to change the overall mapping from an Automatic choice to Box, Cylindrical, Planar, or Spherical mapping.
Simply grab the ball on the Orientation control and rotate it until you are satisfiedwith the direction of your texture. In our case our grain direction was going the wrong way and we needed to fix it so it looked better for presentation. In the past this same trick could be performed with making three unique color styles called Color_&X, &Y, &Z to control direction based mapping. Now its so much easier to change this.
With everything resolved we now have a nicer looking wood block. Yes, this is for my son's cub scout pack derby car. Before you judge me, I'm not a Dad that does the project for his son, I let him make all the design choices while I tinker with software and provide consultative recommendations.
Hi
How I can see the direction of the material when making the cutting of pieces of wood.
best regards.
Carlos.
Posted by: Carlos Vaca | 07/30/2015 at 05:51 PM
What do you mean by this statement? Are you looking for grain direction in a drawing print? For that you can either show the view shaded or you can create a sketched symbol for grain direction.
If you are simply talking about a model, the direction of the material really doesn't matter unless you are doing a visualization of the part in a rendered view and for that you can use the tools I showcased here.
Posted by: Mark Flayler | 09/08/2015 at 05:21 PM