Appearance issue?

kirk_2

I created a part studio with 3 parts (all are similar but created with mirror and rotate).  When I select one and set a color from the appearance dialog, all 3 change color.  I expected only the selected part to change.

kirk_2

Further experiment shows that this occurs only when selecting the original part.  If I select a cloned part I can change its appearance individually.

brian_drake

This behavior is a result of the system we use to generate and persist the 'default colors' that parts have. Essentially, when you create a part several factors are considered to determine what color it should be, and one of those factors is whether the new part is derived from a single feature acting on another part (eg: mirror, split, pattern.) The new part will keep the color of the base part as long as you have not assigned them a specific color, as a result, if you change the color of just the original part the other parts in the mirror/split/pattern etc will take on that new color (unless of course they have been specifically assigned a color by you.) The reason for this is to attempt to preserve a visual relationship between parts while still assigning new colors to parts created by independent features. We would like to know how this system is working / not working for you, so if you want to provide us with some feedback through the '?' menu it would be greatly appreciated, since we could look at specific cases that may be an issue for you.

kirk_2

I am a 35+ year veteran of commercial application software development, now thankfully retired.  My thoughts are always that software should act according to the principle of "least astonishment".  Not sure this feature passes the test, but at least there was a reason behind it rather than a bug.

As always, my use of OS is in playing around mode, rather than any specific need on my part.  

daryntaylor

What are the future plans for Onshape appearances ?
What I mean is, if I want a part to look like it is made from a specific material such as steel or aluminium, will I be able to?
I actually like the system as it stands, and I'm sure that with enough trial and error I could get an appearance to suit, however I wouldn't want to have to remember or record every set of numbers for each individual appearance that I liked.

awk

There are two areas of customization I've seen more than once (send feedback to add more!):

1) Materials choice - this can be used to influence model rendering, and used in calculations for Mass Properties or sharing with a photo-realistic renderer etc.

2) General appearance customization - this can be huge range of customizations from things like the color cycles used when no material is specified (the algorithm @Brian Drake mentioned) to things like text colors and size for the feature list etc.