I am working with marketing to provide photorealistic renderings of our machine products, typically made up of several thousand parts.
We have assemblies that were created in various software versions and imported parts. I need to update them all to current 2011 appearances. Switching to the assembly display manager and sorting by alphabetical groups all of the divverent appearances together and I can select them, but any attempt to replace all of them together with a new appearance results in only one of them changing. It is a very tedius process to do it one at a time.
Is there any way to mulitple replace perform a global appearance replacement and have it occour at the part level?
Hi Anthony,
From an assembly, there's no good way to modify part level appearances in "one fell swoop". There are some shortcuts that could help though. If most/all of the existing appearances are on the part (and not the faces or features), then you can use the selection filter (hit F5) to pick up only the bodies in the graphics area when you click...then applying an appearance (dbl-click from task pane in this scenario) will apply to those bodies. Likewise, you can use the "Attach to Selection" option in the RMB menu of an appearance in the display manager to update the appearance on currently selected items. If you have component level appearances in your assembly, this method can be used to quickly modify a series of component appearances to be the same. Lastly, if ultimately you are creating the renderings of top level assemblies, then you don't need to care about the part level appearances. Component level appearances override everything on the part. So just drag/drop onto the COMPONENT level...or select the components in the FM tree and dbl-click the appearance.
HTH. If it's the appearance hieararchy that has you stumped, say so and there are a few videos around that discuss it in detail.
Ron