Appearance Grouping in SOLIDWORKS Visualize

SOLIDWORKS Visualize is an incredible tool for sales and marketing opportunities to create renderings of products with realistic and intricate appearances. Sometimes, there are products such as cabinets that you may want to be able to render with multiple colors and finishes to showcase a wide variety of options. SOLIDWORKS Visualize includes a few options to tweak to make sure the appearance grouping matches our needs.

This is easy for single parts, but what if you want to modify several items in an assembly like cabinets? That’s when the option to import by Appearance instead of Component/Body can be the difference between prepping four renders over the course of a few hours or a few minutes.

Importing with Component/Part/Body Grouping

If we use an example cabinet assembly from SOLIDWORKS with lower counters and multiple sets of colorful cabinets, what would this look like opened in SOLIDWORKS Visualize? First, let’s open the assembly with the Part Grouping setting set to Component/Part/Body in the Geometry tab. We will also ensure the Appearances tab is checked to include the colors I assigned to the parts for reference. Once imported, the SOLIDWORKS Visualize viewport will be identical to the SOLIDWORKS viewport.

SOLIDWORKS Visualize viewport after import

The next step would be to add textures and appearances to the assembly in SOLIDWORKS Visualize. For this example, I will go to the Appearances tab and open the Wood folder. Dragging and dropping the wood texture from the Appearances panel onto the end cabinet door will change the texture of that cabinet only.

Wood texture applied to a single cabinet door

The applied appearance will not propagate to other bodies sharing the same appearance. Placing textures on individual parts can become tedious if you have several cabinets and want to change the overall finish multiple times for variations.

Importing with Appearance Grouping

This time, let’s open the assembly with the import settings set to group by Appearance. Now, dragging and dropping the texture onto the last cabinet door will change the texture on all of them. Changing the appearance grouping when importing assemblies to SOLIDWORKS Visualize can save hours when batch rendering large assemblies.

Wood texture applied to all cabinet doors

Additionally, appearance groups can be applied at the face level for additional details within your assemblies. In the image below, the center panel (selected from a singular face on the model) has a separate appearance applied to it. This means that when it is imported into SOLIDWORKS Visualize that it will be grouped separately, allowing for greater control over final appearances.

Separate appearances applied to the cabinet doors

How Does SOLIDWORKS Visualize Grouping Work?

The major difference between the import option is determining how SOLIDWORKS Visualize will end up grouping components. The component tree is set up similarly to how the SOLIDWORKS Feature Manager is laid out. Assemblies, parts, bodies, and faces are broken down into their own geometry groups.

SOLIDWORKS Visualize Objects tab

In the second example where we grouped by appearace, SOLIDWORKS Visualize pulls all the appearances set up in SOLIDWORKS (in my case I made the door panel purple and the knob green) and uses them to group the parts. You can see here that with four appearances, there are four parts in the models tab: one for each appearance group.

Objects grouped by appearance

With the object grouping set how we want, I can change the finish of all the cabinet doors and all the knobs with very few clicks. The appearance settings in SOLIDWORKS do not matter since we are changing them downstream in SOLIDWORKS Visualize. As long as they have the same appearance, they will be grouped once imported. It is worth noting that there could be multiple appearances with the same color, but they would still be different groups if created as a new appearance.

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