Appearances Help Please

[Sarah Jayne]

Hello,

 

So basically I work for a company which designs and builds cupboards. We have particular textures available (i.e. different types of wood or gloss)

 

I was wondering if it is possible to be able to drag an appearance (a JPEG image) onto an already drawn cupboard and for the mapping to be automatic. So on the front of the cupboard the wood grain should be vertical and on the side of the cupboards it is also vertical but with plain coloured filleted edging.

 

 

Please could you help to find:

 

1) How to make a folder of our personal wood grains available from the SolidWorks Screen

2) How to make the mapping automatic so that when applying a certain wood grain it is always orientated in the correct direction along with the correct coloured edges.

 

Any help will be greatly appreciated

 

Thank you very much

 

Sarah

 

x

[shift1313]

Sarah. I typed 2 long replies on 2 different days and they aren't showing up in your post. If this goes through send me a PM and ill try to help you.

[shift1313]

It went through! Well im typing from my phone but ill crib note it.

 

2 types of images files in am appearance. Image and p2p. P2p is the one that lets you tile materials. You can male one. If you dont the jpeg will scale to the size of your selection. You can drag n drop from the Task Pane to a face,body,feature etc but it will not auto orient. Typically it seems that wood grain goes in either the x or z direction based on selection. In the task pane you can add a folder location for your own jpeg or p2p files. Also if you have a subscription for solidworks you can log into the sw site and gain access to a ton of luxology materials.

 

My suggestion is to go through the wood materials built in and find one thats close. The image has nothing to do with thinga like reflection. Thats in the advanced settings. If you find a close one then copy it and replace it with your image.

 

I dont know what you mean about the color border. An image would help but it sounds like a second appearance would be needed.

[Sarah Jayne]

Hi shift1313,

 

Thank you for your help, it is much appreciated! So I have now worked out how to make a p2p file and can now drag and drop my wood appearances onto my model. I was hoping that there was a way of making the orientation automatic, based on the location of the appearances, ( I presumed through some sort of mathematical coding which defines an orientation based on a face's size and configuration, but I guess that's not possible on SolidWorks!)

 

I have attached some pictures to this post to try and illustrate what I mean by the coloured edging.

 

The first picture is the whole set of cupboards to try and give you an idea of what I am doing.

 

The second picture is a close up of the top of the doors, I have left the left hand door edging with no appearance applied and the right hand door edging has an appearance applied.

 

I am hoping that there is a way of the colour of these edges changing based on my chosen wood grain for the faces...

 

For example, with the wood grain seen in the second picture, the colour of the edging is similar to the wood colour . So like maybe there is a way to make it so that the colour of the edging is transformed automatically based on the wood grain I allocate to the face?

 

Many thanks

 

Sarah

x

 

P.s. Also does anyone know how to make the size of the grain for all faces the same just by dragging my appearance onto a face, at the moment it seems to be adjusting to the size of my faces! (A LOT of questions I know!)

[shift1313]

Sarah, i am still having a bunch of issues posting from my computer but ill give it another shot. I've been trying for days.

 

What you are wanting to do, there isn't a way to do it automatically like you want. Depending on the variations of what you are doing its probably best to work with configurations. In the case of configurations you would make one set of cabinets and then update their dimensions in different configurations for various sizes. You can get really fancy and use Driveworks(driveworks Xpress is built into solidworks but Solo or pro are paid programs). These let you build in some UI functionality to simply enter dimensions and options and have it build your file. If you use Configs or Driveworks the things you want to pay attention to are the settings in your original file for the apperances. When you are in your appearance on the "Advanced" tab under "mapping" you have Size/Orientation options. You want to keep a fixed aspect ratio with your image but as long as you dont have the fit width or height to selection it won't stretch the image. If your P2P file is good it will simply tile. I did a quick test to check it out and it works fine. As far as your edges, are they supposed to be a different appearance? When you apply appearances in a model you can apply them to features, like fillets. That would be a quick way to handle those. You can do this in the feature tree or by dragging/dropping onto one filleted face and selecting the "Feature" icon from the quick context flyout that shows up next to the cursor.

 

I have several driveworks courses on my site. If you register there are several free ones for Xpress. The longer Solo course isn't free.

 

https://www.solidbox.tv/courses/ going here shows you all the courses on the site, easy way to see which ones are free.

 

https://www.solidbox.tv/software/solidworks/driveworks/ this is the section just for DW.

 

There are other ways you can do this as well. Using API and programming your own macro to apply appearances could get it to do what you want, but you would likely need to build thousands of models before the time spent in API paid off for something like this.

[Sarah Jayne]

thank you for all your shift1313

and the links to your website, very useful!