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Request: Preserve separate feature colors for Keyshort export

Toybuilder

Senior Member
I use Alibre Design quite a lot in conjunction with Altium Designer to detail the mechanical aspects of my projects and to create more complete representations of a finished product, where the electronics is only a part of a much bigger overall project.

I have recently started to use Keyshot to get nicer looking renderings for customer presentations, but am being stymied by the Alibre-Keyshot limitation where single-part models will export entirely in one color, even when there are separate colors on part features.

This is particularly challenging when using vendor-supplied STEP files in my designs, as I don't control the part, and recreating the part as an assembly is not a viable option.

Several examples of where this fails:

1: Part # markings on the relay are the same color as the relay body.
2: USB connector's contacts, shell, and body plastic are all in the same color
3: Component plastic body and metal leads are the same color.
4: Faceplate "decal" is the same color as the substrate.
J3uRAKm.png


I don't know if this is a deliberate restriction to distinguish KeyShot CAD capability from KeyShot Pro; but since Alibre Design is able to export STEP214 with colored features, it seems like it would be not much different to exporting colored features to Keyshot?

Thanks!
 

JST

Alibre Super User
That goes with the issue of materials. One part in AD is one material, and while there are some things that can be done, they do not seem to export.

The same thing to most extent in Keyshot. So I have had to put layers on the AD model specifically so that they could have a different "material" in Keyshot.

It seems that I was able to export colors to Keyshot directly, no file greation..... Not entirely sure how I did it, as I actually did it by accident ! But it did work. I did not like the colors, they were not what I expected, quite. Did not translate well from AD to Keyshot. But it did happen.

However the Keyshot colors are so much more "interesting" in possibility that you would probably be better off to develop a material property file in Keyshot. You assign the materials in Keyshot and associate them with the exported AD entities in a Keyshot file that becomes part of the BIP file.

Now if Alibre LLC would just FIX the issue of the materials exporting as filenames, we could name the "material" property in AD with the Keyshot material name, and have it import with no fuss.
 

simonb65

Alibre Super User
1: Part # markings on the relay are the same color as the relay body.
2: USB connector's contacts, shell, and body plastic are all in the same color
3: Component plastic body and metal leads are the same color.
4: Faceplate "decal" is the same color as the substrate.
I encountered the same problems, and whilst its far from a desirable solution, I've now started building my 3D model library using assemblies so that a socket is made up of multiple parts, i.e a housing, pin, etc. Then with the parts named appropriately, I can apply a 'Material Template' on the whole model to render it. i.e. Pin material, plastic package, etc by wildcard matching, i.e. *pin* = MaterialX, etc
I've written my own application that takes the output of any PCB package (i.e. manufacturing files) and creates an Alibre assembly of the whole design, importing my library models. It even generates the copper/resist/silk jpg which can be applied as a label to the PCB in Keyshot. Here is very much a 'Work In Progress' on the parts library ...
upload_2017-11-9_21-5-35.png
Just wish Keyshot had an API like Alibre so I can automate the application of materials and labels too!
 
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