Switch between: Random Colors / Material Color / Surface Coating

sebastian_glanzner

I would like to have a new Button in Onshape to switch all colors of all parts at the same time

Each part could have three colors (or appearances):

• Random Color - The initial color Onshape uses when you create parts in the part studio. These colors help to distinguish the different parts.

• Material Color - This is the color defined by the used Material. For example: The steel parts are grey and rubber parts are black. This helps identifying all rubber parts in an assembly. It could also help finding parts which have no material assigned yet.

• Surface Color - This could be used to differentiate the raw uncoated steel parts and steel parts with a surface coating. (Surface Coating could be similar to the user defined materials)

With one click on the button, all colors are switched. Imagine you have a customer and you want to show him how the whole assembly will look like, you would have to override all appearances of each part. With the button you could activate the Material Color mode to show him which parts are steel, brass, aluminum, wood, rubber,... . Of course you can always use the Button to switch back to the Random Color mode to continue designing.

This would also very useful if you assign a unique RGB Values to all parts which have the same material/surface. For example in an external rendering software (like Keyshot), you can select all parts with the same color to be displayed as brushed stainless steel. You can also make sure that all parts exported as Step-Files have the same color.

john_mcclary

Sounds a lot like one of the many uses of display states to me.

I make good use of display states in SW, would be nice to see that in OS too (also on the assembly level).

For now you "could" get away with creating 3 configurations, "Random", "Material Color", "Surface Color"
But you have to set up each part color one at a time.

noa

@sebastian_glanzner this isn't everything that you're asking for, but if you have any interest in playing with Python and Onshape's APIs, you can get quite far. A while back I wrote a script (albeit a possible messy one) that allows you to define a set of colors, specify a document ID and workspace ID, and recolor all parts in that document. I cleaned it up and made sure it's public – you can view it, use it, and adapt it, here: https://github.com/noanflaherty/os-part-coloring