Color and Appearance Presented by the Three Engineers (and friend)

Basic Color 101…  After you have finished making a part you may want to modify it’s color for many various reasons.  To do so simply click on “color and appearance” located in the View Menu of Pro Engineer.

Basic Colors 101…  On Pro E you can modify colors on individual surfaces or the entire part depending on your desired appearance.  Under Assignments choose Part to modify the entire part and surfaces if you only want to change one or two surfaces.

Basic Colors 101…  Because the default appearance can not be modified you will need to either make a new appearance or click on a pre- existing one.  To make a new appearance click the Plus Sign to the right of the appearances.  After you have an appearance that you can work with, click on apply so that the part will reflect the appearance.

Basic Colors 101…  Now that you have applied an appearance to your part you can choose it’s color.  To change the color of individual surfaces you can click on any surface or hold control while clicking on multiple surfaces to change the colors of more than one surface at a time.

Basic Colors 101…  After you have made your selection click on the Color Tab in the properties sub-window.  This will open up the color editor where you can pick the color of your surfaces using the color wheel or the blending palette.

Basic Colors 101…  In the color wheel simply click on your desired color and then adjust the contrast directly beneath the wheel on the contrast bar.  You can also use the rgb/hsv slider to change the color of the appearance by adjusting the individual sliders.

Basic Colors 101…  In the blending palette click on one of the four little squares surrounding the palette, and then choose a color for it on the wheel. Once you have chosen the four colors you want to blend, you can click the color you want from the palette.

Basic Colors 101…  Now that you know the basics you can experiment with your parts to put some life them.  In the next lesson we will go into more depth with what you can do with the color and appearance editor.

Mapping 101… To start with the mapping you first have to place a color in the object that you will be copying. To do that all you have to do is color the object like we did in the last film.

 To use the map tool you will first have to have something in the list so that you can put something in the object and I will show you how to place pictures in the in the bump, color texture and decal.

 We will also be placing a new texture in the list by taking it from a different list. This is so that you can have more to choose from. And later we will also show you how to take pictures off the web that you can use as well.

 The other things that we will do is to show you the difference in the Bump, Color texture and Decal maps. The Bump will show you a 3-D shadow and the Color texture will show you a color 3-D picture where the decal will only give you a 2-D print.

 We will also show you how to move the picture on the X and Y axis by using the tool in the positioning page called copies and the positioning tool itself as well as the flipping tool.

Advanced Section 101 We are going to go over the advanced section of the appearance editor and teach you how to use the reflection, transparency and refraction tools.

 The reflecting tool will show you how much light will reflect off the surface of the object and how it can be controlled.

 In the transparency tool it does what the name means. It will make the object invisible or slightly invisible.

 When using the refraction tool on a part it will change the look of the part that is being seen though the part that has the refraction on it.

Importing pictures 101…  What we will be doing in this section is to import external files from the web and saving them and putting them on a part.

 Once the picture you want is located you will need to save it in a place that you will be able to find in Pro- engineer

 It is very important that you save it as (jpg) on the file extension. You can change it by going to the working directory and changing it there.

 After getting the picture that you wanted you will need to open up Pro- engineer. Then go to map in appearance placement and open the texture box. Then open up the file that you saved.

 Once you have the picture in the texture box then you can apply it to the object.

 Save a copy of the part that has been done with the picture and place a name to it and then save it on the working directory.

 We have restarted Pro-engineer so that we can show you how to bring back your picture. You will need to go to the file that you saved but first you will need to set up the working directory in Pro-engineer.

 Once you have set up the working directory in pro-engineer you will be able to see your part with your picture on it and will be able to bring it up anytime.

Parts in VRML 101…  After completing a certain part on Pro E you might need to set it up in the Virtual World.  In this section we will be saving files in VRML and setting them up in the virtual world.

 After you have completed the desired part you need to save the file as a VRML file type.  Make sure that in the export VRML menu you select setup, click on high quality, designated parameter, and all views

 By saving the part as a VRML file it will create an internet file which is the file type needed to place a part in the Virtual World.

 You can also process different changes by opening notepad to the VRML file.  For instance you can change the anchor and pictures on the part by modifying the program code in notepad.

 There are times when a certain view is required in the Virtual World. Pro E has a feature where a particular view of the part can be saved in VRML.