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Welcome back to our series of Inventor tutorials for beginners. In this article, we'll be talking about applying materials and appearance to your models. After you've got your software open, go to the Get Started tab. Then, click on Projects. Here we've got branches for the appearance and materials libraries; they're right here, so they are easy to find. If we right click, we can select Active Library or Remove library. If you have an open part, then these options will be grayed out. I can select the default project and right click, and then these options will become available.
Let's close this window, and then assign material to our part. Let's select favorites. We can also select the AutoDesk material library and the Inventor material library. I'm going to select Aluminum. Now, let's see how we can add material to our Favorites. Click the Material browser. Here we can see the favorites, the AutoDesk material library, and the Inventor library. Let's try adding, for example, ABS plastic to My Favorites. All we do is right click, and then select Favorites. Presto, now it's added!
We can also edit material right from the part level. When we edit the appearance, we are editing the physical properties. We can also replace aspects of the material. From here, you can select another appearance. I'm going to try Anodized Blue. As soon as I select it, the appearance is applied. Let's switch to flat aluminum. As soon as I select it, it is applied. The same goes for physical properties. At the bottom of the material browser, we're able to change physical properties as well as appearance properties.
Let's change the transparency value, right from this pane. And then let's cancel out and close the material browser. As you can see, this is a pretty handy way to edit materials and appearance.
Next let's change the appearance of the part, and from the appearance browser. We've got favorites in here too, as well as the AutoDesk material library and the Inventor material library. Once again, to add an appearance to the favorites, all you do is select it, then right-click and choose Favorite from the drop down menu.
If you double click on any appearance, you'll be able to adjust a number of settings. Let's left click on the image of the appearance, and then the texture editor opens. Here we can adjust many texture properties. Let's close it and select Favorites. I'm going to select machined aluminum. Now as I mentioned before, I selected favorites here. If I control-select two faces and then right-click and select properties, I see the properties that are in common for both. Now this drop down menu allows me to select from your favorites. But let's select the AutoDesk material library. If we right click and select properties, we get many more choices. We can also clear appearances, just by using the clear tool.
Adjusting appearances is pretty straightforward. We select the Adjust tool, and then use the eye dropper to make selections of entities in the graphic area. For example, a face. We're able to re-position, scale and rotate, and adjust the color using the color wheel. Inventor creates a new appearance based on your adjustments, and we can copy this appearance to other faces, also.
This concludes this article about applying materials and appearance in this Inventor tutorial for beginner's series. Stay tuned for our next article about AutoDesk Inventor.
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