Inventor gives you some pretty useful
tools for manipulating the appearances and materials of your models. Inventor
comes with enormous built in materials libraries. There is both the Inventor
material library and the AutoDesk material library. You can pull in materials
and appearances that you use more frequently into your favorites, for easy
reference and access. You can also create your own custom libraries.
If you use the material browser, you
also have easy access to the AutoDesk material library, the Inventor
material library as well as your favorites. If you want to add a material
to My Favorites, you just need to right click on any item and select Favorites.
That’s it!
You don’t have to accept the material
just as Inventor supplies it; you can definitely modify its color, texture and
other physical properties such as transparency and so on. From the appearance library, if you double
click on any image of an appearance, the texture editor opens. We can adjust
many aspects of an appearance’s texture prior to saving. You can also adjust
the physical properties like scale, position, rotation angle and so on. We can
also clear the appearances using the clear tool. Once you’ve made changes to a
material or appearance, you can save it for future use. You can copy it to
other parts or faces or features.
As you can see, working
with materials and appearances in Inventor Training is made very easy by
the appearance browser and the materials browser. We’ll be taking up this topic
in greater detail in our next entry; stay tuned for more in our Inventor tutorials
for beginner’s series.