Appearance Libraries

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Appearances 

Appearances (the colour of your part) are usually applied through the top drop down menu.
      

They are stored in two places, locally in the file, or in the central library. Any appearance stored locally will only be available for that file. Whereas any appearance in the library section will be available for all files and all users, assuming that you share a common library. 

You can see what is contained in each by clicking the colour wheel on the top bar:

The appearance window

The appearances browser is split into 3 parts:

The window at the top shows all appearances stored locally in the document. 
The area down the side shows all libraries relevant to your project file.
The central area is where all library appearances are shown. 


Any appearances that have been applied through the top drop down menu will appear in the local area. If you click the create new button in the bottom left, this will also appear in the local section.

You can drag and drop appearances from the library area up into the local window. This will create a copy of the appearance in the document and allow you to edit or make tweaks. 

To overwrite or add a new appearance to the library, simply drag and drop the appearance from the local area to the library area. This is now available for all parts and all users with access to your library. 

Updating appearances in old documents 

If you update an appearance and then overwrite the library item, the new improved appearance will only show on parts it is applied to after the edit. This is because all documents that it has been used on previously will have a local copy without those edits. 
For example, if I change an appearance and then open an assembly, all the parts will show the old version of the texture. This can be quite frustrating if you want to render a model and your appearances no longer match. 
In order to update these appearances to match the latest version of the library, you can use the style update command. 

This is found on the manage ribbon.



Clicking update will bring up a window showing the appearances and styles contained in the assembly or document. 


Materials should be ticked in order to update your appearances.
Make sure you have the correct library selected.

You can run the command again on a different library, but if you have two appearances in different libraries with the same name, they will fight over which version to use.

At first the window will be fairly empty, but when you click the 'update styles in all child documents,' you will see all the local appearances contained in the parts that make up the assembly. 


The style name is the name of the appearance applied to each document.
Location shows that they are local versions of the style.
Changes shows where the difference in appearance is located, document or library.
Update is where you can tell Inventor to update the appearance. 

I will normally click yes to all, but you can be selective if you want. 

Clicking OK will update all the appearances in the assembly to match the current version in the library.

If you open an assembly that has been released to Vault, Inventor will not let you overwrite the appearance. If you are just rendering the file you can still plough ahead and overwrite the appearances temporarily in the open files. Click 'yes to all' when you see this dialogue. 




For more information on the style library, see my previous post:
https://inventorfasttips.blogspot.com/2021/08/style-library-conflicts.html





















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