How do I prevent two separate extrusions from having merged faces?

ria_man

When I extrude a sketch, I extrude it to the same length as another sketch. I want to edit the appearance and make the separate extrusions different colors, but the faces of the extrusions merge and all of it becomes one color instead of the part I just extruded. Is there a way I can fix this or stop the face merge from happening?

NeilCooke

In the second extrude, click New instead of Add

martien

That creates new parts that then overlap in space.

The scenario I have why I am looking for an answer is that I want to have a reasonably complex inlay pattern properly reflected with differently coloured faces, and I have not yet been able to find a way to do that. In my case, all the parts (or surfaces) are generated with linear and circular patterns, so the parts to select are variable, so looking for ways to do this without the need to select parts or surfaces (hence the attempt to do this with a merge.

For now, as a workaround, I have extruded up to the face of the first set of parts, with an offset of -1e-4, just to keep the faces separate, but the design intent is that the faces are at the same level.

S1mon

You can color faces by feature, if that helps.

Perhaps you can share an image or link to a file?