In this lesson, we'll discuss how to apply visual appearances. After completing this lesson, you'll be able to add an appearance and update a distributed design version. Once we have our scene set up, and we want to talk about appearances, we can do that by selecting the Appearance option in Setup. Or using A, the shortcut key for the Appearance menu. Now the shortcut key A works not only in the rendering environment, but also inside of the model workspace and patch workspace. So any time you want to change the appearance of something you can do that. Now I do want to note we already applied a physical material to this. In general you don't have to apply a physical material, but for us it was important to know the mass of the design, so we apply that Nylon material. By applying Nylon material it automatically used the Nylon 66 appearance. So those are linked together and we don't actually have to change the appearance at all. If you want to, we can simply go into the appearance library, we can decide what kind of material we want to use, for instance, a plastic if we want to use an opaque plastic. And we want to use a different color such as a green or a blue, we can simply drag that on and Close. When we look at this, if we expand XSTAR and we take a look at the bodies, and we look at the XSTAR body, and we right-click and go to properties, We still have the physical material set to Nylon 6, all we've done is we've overrode the physical materials appearance. So by default when you apply that physical material, it'll bring in an appearance that looks similar. So for instance, if you choose some metallic appearance, like aluminum, it'll bring in a shiny aluminum appearance with it, at any point in time we can override that. Now, in our case, I actually want to leave it white, so I am going to remove, unassign and delete that green appearance, and it'll go back to its default. So if we expand XStar and we click on the XStar body, We can see that it's using the Nylon 6 physical material and the appearance has gone back to the Nylon 66 white. So if you want to change the appearance of any of that, you certainly can. In terms of the appearance of the motors, these come in directly from the linked file, the distributed design file. So if we come in and we try to change those, you can see that this red material here is for the motion, or the path, of the prop. So if we right-click and we edit that material, and let's say that we want to change the transparency of it. We can go into the advance tab, we can scroll down and look at the Advance Highlights. We can change anything such as the bump pattern, or the cutout, we can modify these parameters however we want. So currently it's set to an acrylic material, and we have the index of refraction set to 1.4. If we change this value, for instance, if we change it to 1 and apply it, it'll affect all of the props in the design. So notice it says, Old material could not be removed from document, possibly because it's the default material. And sometimes you'll get that depending on how the design is inserted, but if we go down and we try to apply say an Amber translucent material. You notice that it's assigned to the bodies or faces because it's a reference component. So they way that we want to get around this is by modifying this component in its original file. So if we expand the data panel, and we double click to open the DYS motor in its own file, we can then come in and modify its appearances. If we decide we simply want to hide the prop path because we no longer need it, we can save a new version of that file. And we go back to our XStar, you'll notice that we get a warning that it's currently out of date. We can right-click, and we can figure out if we need to update this, and there's also a link option at the top, where if we click on that it'll update the components to its latest version. So you'll notice how it updates the original, but it doesn't update the mirrored versions of it. Now the mirrored versions, we actually have complete control over the bodies. So we can simply hide the paths on those, We can go into each one and simply hide those. So that way, we're only showing the props. So again, there are various ways that we can adjust these appearances, and as we look at this design we now have the motor, the props, and the Nylon 6 white material. So again lets go ahead and save, that way we can move on to the next step.
