Tips & Tricks: Assigning Appearance States in Creo 4.0

Assigning an appearance to an assembly helps you visualize the finished product. So, what happens when you have appearance variations? With Creo 4.0, now you can assign “appearance states” to those variations. You can even link them to assembly combined views. Here’s how:

Open the View Manager

Appearance states are saved in the View Manager.

To open this dialog, click View Manager in the graphics toolbar.

Grapics toolbar

Change Default Appearance State

You can’t change the Master Appearance; its purpose is to clear appearances. However, you can change the default. Just follow these steps:

1. In the View Manager dialog, open the Appearance tab.
2. Right-click Default Appearance and select Activate.
3. In the Model Display group on the Model tab, click Appearances.
4. Select an appearance from the palette.
5. Click the model or surfaces on the model to change their appearance.
6. Click OK.

Selecting an appearance in the palette.

The system saves the changes to the active appearance. In this example, the Default Appearance is active, so that’s where the change is saved.

Create a New Appearance

From the Appearance tab in the View Manager dialog, click New to create a new appearance.

A new appearance is created and it becomes the active appearance. Now you can follow the same steps as we did to change Default Appearance.

Use Default Appearance of an Assembly

Right-click Master Appearance in the View Manager and select Activate. The default appearance of the assembly is now used.

Watch the Demo

You can see a brief demo of these tips in the video below.

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