Why can't I assign a material to composite parts?

MorganC

I am trying to create a scene with Reality Server but it has brought the two composite parts in the assembly in as a bright pink and doesn't seem to allow me to add materials/appearances to them the normal way. Is there something else that I have to do?

NeilCooke

@paul_arden ^^

Paul_Arden

Quick question, is your Composite Part opened or closed? We do have a test case covering Composite parts in Assemblies and I just re-ran that and didn't encounter any issues so it might be something specific to your Document. If there is any way you can reproduce in a simple Document that you can share with us that would help us diagnose the problem.

Also a few notes. For Composite Parts, we keep the materials on the individual Parts within the Composite, however material assignment to individual parts will not work because they are considered one Part. However you can get access to the Parts within to assign individual materials using the Reveal Full Tree option.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B05d-g5BGkI&list=PLwUZBACf-CBNXLL1ymEtAOMtYuaLXJQ78&index=15

That video is actually about assigning materials to individual faces of Part, however the principle is identical. If you rather want to put a new material on the whole Composite and everything within it then you will need to use the Material Override functionality. You can see more about this in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VPx6qr_FQY&list=PLwUZBACf-CBNXLL1ymEtAOMtYuaLXJQ78&index=10

While the video is not specifically addressing Composite Parts, it will still work and override the materials on the Parts within the Composite which are not visible in the scene graph (unless you use the Reveal Full Tree feature mentioned above.

Even though it looks like there is an issue in your case with the initial state, you should still be able to put materials on the individual Parts or the whole Composite using the methods above. I'd still like to find the root cause of the missing material (that is what causes the pink) though, so an example document would help a lot there. As I say our tests don't show this problem.

MorganC

The composite is closed. I only need to apply a material to the whole composite, not individual parts within it. The material override function worked for changing the material though if there were many composite parts in an assembly I could see that being quite tedious to do for every one!

In terms of your first video link, that looks to work well for applying the material to individual composite parts so cheers for the link! Taking it one step further, how would I apply a material to faces? Say for example to "paint" lettering that has been sightly extruded into a metal plate?

I also noticed that even though I am saving my scenes, when I come back to the RealityServer there are no scenes saved so I'm not sure why they are getting wiped out or maybe there is an additional workflow to save them?

Paul_Arden

For painting individual faces in Composites you would need to do another level of Reveal Full Tree to get down to the face level. Alternatively if you are only really worried about the colour and not the material properties you could use the new face colours feature in Onshape which does get translated. However if your Composite material translations are broken (your original problem) that won't help so we'd still like to get to the bottom of that.

Saving should absolutely work and we haven't had any reports of issues from other users (which we definitely would if people couldn't save). If you Contact Support through Onshape, while the RealityServer tab is active it will route that request to us so we can take a look, that will get us your user ID so we can check logs on our servers and so on.

MorganC

Support request submitted

Paul_Arden

Cheers, we'll follow up with you there.

Paul_Arden

@MSC_Design_Services thank you for the great reproduction cases for the issue. This allowed us to resolve the problem (actually several related issues now). So the fix is live and Composites should now get correct materials and also all of the parts in the Composite should get correctly converted.