SolidWorks Kit question

10 Nov, 2011 by Andrew Ward in Discussion, Questions
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Adam, as you already know, I’ve been using the SolidWorks Kit to bring models into Modo to render them. I’ve discovered that some of the material designations available in SW are really quite good, so there’s no need to apply new materials once I bring the model into Modo. Since I prefer to bring them in using the Import Parts > Light option, assigning materials in SW saves me from having to convert the model into a regular Mesh. Most of the time this shortcut has worked well for me, but yesterday I encountered a situation where a color that looked right in SW, appeared much too bright in Modo, so I had to make the change there. I’m referring to the yellow parts below:

Now usually this wouldn’t have taken much work because I make sure not to join parts together in SW that I intend to assign a different colors to. However, in this case those flaps are joined to the rest of the airplane body, so I had to apply the yellow by selecting their faces instead of by part. You can probably guess what happened: when it came time to change the yellow in Modo, I had to change the color of each yellow face separately, and there were many, many faces to change. So my question is, is there a way to select all the parts of a model that have the same color at once and change their color (or apply a different material to them) simultaneously? 

2 Responses

  1. adam says:

    Hmm, you can select polygons by material assignment in the ‘Lists’ tab, but I’m not sure you could do it by diffuse color without a custom script. That could be one wicked-useful script, though! I’ll bet it would be pretty easy to write as scripts go.

    I think your best solution is to make sure the wing flaps are separate bodies in SW to begin with. Then it’s easy to select just the body you need.

    Adam

    • Andrew Ward says:

      Rats. I was sure there was a way to isolate things by color. Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to make the flaps separate bodies. :-)

      I found some more high res. backgrounds to use in addition to the one above:

      [img]http://aurelius.smugmug.com/Art/Renderings/i-8D22fFH/0/S/D-S.jpg[/img]

      [img]http://aurelius.smugmug.com/Art/Renderings/i-5tR4qfP/0/S/B-S.jpg[/img]

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