Inventor Training for Beginners: Working With Appearances and Materials

Inventor gives you some pretty useful tools for manipulating the appearances and materials of your models. Inventor comes with enormous built in materials libraries. There is both the Inventor material library and the AutoDesk material library. You can pull in materials and appearances that you use more frequently into your favorites, for easy reference and access. You can also create your own custom libraries.

If you use the material browser, you also have easy access to the AutoDesk material library, the Inventor material library as well as your favorites. If you want to add a material to My Favorites, you just need to right click on any item and select Favorites. That’s it!

You don’t have to accept the material just as Inventor supplies it; you can definitely modify its color, texture and other physical properties such as transparency and so on.  From the appearance library, if you double click on any image of an appearance, the texture editor opens. We can adjust many aspects of an appearance’s texture prior to saving. You can also adjust the physical properties like scale, position, rotation angle and so on. We can also clear the appearances using the clear tool. Once you’ve made changes to a material or appearance, you can save it for future use. You can copy it to other parts or faces or features.

As you can see, working with materials and appearances in Inventor Training is made very easy by the appearance browser and the materials browser. We’ll be taking up this topic in greater detail in our next entry; stay tuned for more in our Inventor tutorials for beginner’s series.