Adding Custom Color or Material to your Inventor Model

As with many of my other posts, this one was inspired by a question from a student.  Inventor has so much power in display and rendering that few take advantage of.  I am hoping that by breaking the process down into simple steps you will add more custom colors to your design.  There are a few precautions that you should take before starting.  The first is to make sure that you are allowed to add these custom materials and then consider whether you will be sharing these parts with others.

So question 1. Am I allowed to add custom color or material?  This can be found by looking at your project file settings.  You will want the "Use style Library" set to "yes".  Check out the video for details on how to check that...

You want to change it to "yes" from "read only" because if it is set to read only then you won't be able to create anything new and you will get an error if you try.

The question 2. Will I be sharing it with anyone else?  We must ask ourselves this question before proceeding because it can make a difference.  If you want to send it to a professor or corporate sponsor then you can use the "pack and go" to grab everything needed.  However, if you are looking to share it within a design team at school there are some considerations.  I have had support calls in the past of users who created some new material and then someone else in the group opened the part only to have an error come up.  You see it couldn't find the material specified and didn't know where to look.  This is why I recommend using a shared library of colors, textures, and parts.  You can change these locations under your Tools - Application Options - File tab.  You will want to think about where you will store the new files as well as possibly sharing the project as well.  The two boxed in red below show where you may want a common site for the group.

And now that we got past that part, it is time to have some fun.  I hope by now you have figured out how to change the color on a part.  You can go to the top right and change the color of the entire part from "as material" to something listed that is very cool.  Check out the video below....

The last thing that we are going to cover tonight is how to create our own color.  The video below shows not only that but also how to add texture to the color.  I will have to cover adding your own bmp and creating a new material in tomorrow's blog so... stay tuned.