[Visualize] Applying Multiple Appearances to a single Part

Visualize naturally organizes your imported models into models and parts in the model tree. When importing assemblies, this import process is pretty intuitive, where your top level assembly is designated as a “model” and the assembly’s components are designated as “parts” (for more information on the difference between models and parts, see Appendix A of our Model Grouping article here: [Visualize] Model Grouping Master List).

When importing a part file, however, you might sometimes want to apply a certain appearance to only certain faces and leave other faces untouched. Visualize, by default, will attempt to apply the appearance to an entire part. This means that you’ll have to do some part splitting in order to apply different appearances to different sections of your model.

Let’s look at the example model below:

If we take a look at the model tree of this file, we see that the model only has one “part” (indicated by the blue cube icon):

This means that any appearance that we apply will be applied to the entirety of the cube (which we can see in the above screenshots). If we wanted to apply the color red to select faces only, we’ll have to split that one part into two or more parts. We can do this by using the aptly named “Split Part” command. We can find this command in a few different locations:

1. Under Tools -> Split Part

2. Right Clicking the Model in the 3D Viewport -> Edit -> Split Part

3. Right clicking on the model in the model tree -> Edit -> Split Part

Once you’ve started the “Split Part” command, select the faces that you’d like to split and click on “Execute Split” once finished.

Once you’ve clicked “Execute Split”, verify the results by checking the model tree:

We can now see that there are two parts in the model tree. Since our appearances are applied on a part by part basis, we should be able to apply two different colors to our cube now.

We can see that after the split, we’re able to successfully apply multiple colors to different faces in our model.

MultiBody Parts

In Solidworks, working with part files that have multiple bodies in them is a fairly common practice. When importing a multibody part file into Visualize, Visualize will still default to seeing the model as only one part with one body, as opposed to one part with multiple bodies.

Observe the multibody part and its corresponding model tree below:

We can see that the we’re getting the exact same behavior as our single body part file in the first half of this article. Therefore, in order to assign different colors to different bodies in our part file, we’ll have to split the part again using the “Split Part” command. Once we do that, we’ll see that our model tree will split correctly and our appearances will work as desired:

If you’re still having trouble applying multiple appearances to a single part file, feel free to contact Hawk Ridge Systems Technical Support at 877.266.4469 (US) or 866.587.6803 (Canada) or you can submit a support ticket by sending an email to support@hawkridgesys.com.