Assigning Materials to many items

[sidco7]

Hello,

I would like to know if there is an easy way to assign a material type to many different items in the model all at once? Many of my models have hundreds of small items in them and when I import the model into Hypershot, I have to go over each item individually and assign a material with a single click. I'm hoping there is an easy way to do this.

 

[HaroldL]

Try to assign the same RGB color to each part in Alibre that you want to share materials in HS. What I've been seeing is that even with the same color on different parts they won't be in the same material group in HS so you will still need to pick some parts independently in HS.
Assigning colors at the assembly level (in v12) does not seem to carry over in the exported file. Exporting the assembly as a STEP214 file seems to work better than exporting as a native Alibre .stp as far as keeping the Alibre color assignments.
It's been my experience that if you have multiple copies of the same part in your assembly, like hardware items, they will all inherit the same material in HS.
H.
v12

 

[sidco7]

Nope, no luck. Still the same. I have to individually click and assign a material to each item.


A lot of my models are drawn in Autocad, exported as a .sat file and then imported into Alibre. Could this have something to do with it. Or is this something that Hypershot just requires. Its painfully tedious.

 

[HaroldL]

I'm not familiar with the .sat format.

One thing to try when applying the materials in HS: apply material to the first item you want to be in the same material group. Then Shift-select the item you just applied material to, then hold down Shift And Control to paint the rest of the items for the group. Then when you need to make changes all of these items should change at the same time. It will be a real pain going through the model the first time, but changes will be easier. You can check to make sure that this worked by double-clicking on a few of the items to see that the material is the same in the dialog header that pops up.

H.
v12