Thursday October 11, 2018 at 10:51am
Solidworks allows you to set appearances of your parts for your particular requirements, I will show you in this log how to set them as well as create your own custom appearances.
You can open the appearances window by either clicking the ‘Edit Appearance’ button or the ‘Appearance button on the task pane.
SOLIDWORKS allows you to set
appearances of your parts for your particular requirements, I will show you in
this log how to set them as well as create your own custom appearances.
You can
open the appearances window by either clicking the ‘Edit Appearance’ button or
the ‘Appearance' button on the task pane.
Once
opened this window should pop out from the task pane on the right where you can
select your required appearance.
The appearances are split up into
material based sub categories for example Rosewood.
Not only
can you set the appearance of your parts but you can also adjust the mapping of
the appearance so that it follows a direction for example changing wood grain
direction.
To adjust the appearance mapping you
first need to click the ‘Edit appearances’ button as before.
In the
‘mapping’ tab of the edit appearances window you can adjust the appearance
layout for example you can set it to sphere so the texture of the appearance
will fit to a spherical object as shown in the next picture.
You can also adjust the size of the
texture on the part using the mapping tab as shown in the images below.
By dragging a corner of the box that appears you
can change the size of the texture.
You can
also change the texture of your appearance by using saved images. To change the
texture, click the browse button under the image section. Then select the image
you wish to use and it will be added into the appearance like shown below.
If the
appearance you are looking for is not in SOLIDWORKS and you can’t recreate it
using images you can download custom appearances made by other people at: http://community.thefoundry.co.uk/asset/materials/
As you can see in the image below
the custom appearances are displayed as a grid. Once you have found your
desired appearance click the name to open the download page.
Then simply
press the download button.
The
appearance will download as a zip file so you need to extract it to a suitable
location.
Once
extracted you need to add the file location to your appearances window in the
task pane. You can do this by clicking the button shown in the image below.
This button
will bring up a file explorer window where you need to find the folder where
your new appearance is located. This will add your custom appearances in.
The new
appearance will show up in their own sub category named after the folder they
were in.
If the
appearance is 3D it will not properly show up in the SOLIDWORKS graphics area
but does appear in Photoview 360.