Component color swatch and color cycling

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Component color swatch and color cycling.

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In this video, we'll use Component Color Cycling, modify a component's color and enable component color swatch.

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In Fusion 360, we want to carry on with our gear reduction housing assembly.

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At this point, what we've done is we've converted a couple bodies to components and we've used a script to generate three separate spur gears.

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Everything in Fusion 360 by default will take on a default physical material and its appearance.

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In most cases, unless you've changed this, it'll be a gray steel material.

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When you begin working with assemblies that have a large number of components,

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for example, we have multiple covers, housings and gears in this assembly, all of the same gray.

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This can be difficult for us to identify certain components.

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And if we want to begin working on something, we can activate it and change the opacity.

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But at the very top level, it's hard for us to identify what each of these components is.

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One way that we can get around that is by using Inspect and something called Component Color Cycling Toggle.

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This can also be found on the Tools menu under Component Color Cycle Toggle in the Inspect section.

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What we're gonna do is we're going to turn on Component Color Cycling,

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and we're going to take a look at what happens to all of the different bodies and components in design.

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First, let's take a look at the timeline at the bottom.

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You'll see a large green bar that's placed above a large number of features.

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That green bar represents the top level of the design.

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And because all of these bodies were created originally in the design as bodies,

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they all fall under that green bar until we began creating components.

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You can see here that we have our housing mount and that housing mount was created by extruding a solid body as a new component.

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Then you can see that we converted multiple bodies to components again under that green color.

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And then you can see that we move them under our housing empty component.

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When we have these sub components, you can see the top level housing color.

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And then you can see individual colors for things like the spur gears and then things like capture position that happened at the top level.

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Not only does this colorize the timeline at the bottom, but it also places that color in the browser as well as on the components themselves.

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So this can be extremely helpful in terms of visualizing.

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There are some cases where certain components will have very similar colors.

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Let's go ahead and hide the housing mount and the entire housing and take a look at just the gears.

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You'll notice that they're various shades of red.

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The larger gear, the 48 tooth is a darker red and then we're transitioning to more of a pink and then a tan color.

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If we want to identify these with more unique colors, we can right click on any of them and use these Cycle Component Color options.

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Now the yellow stands out a little bit more than just the red did and we can bring back our housing and we can see that color a little bit easier.

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If we want to turn this off at any point in time, we can use Shift and N on the keyboard or go back to our Component Color Cycle Toggle,

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and it will go back to that default gray appearance.

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If we modify things like the appearances or the physical materials of any component,

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those will stay with those components as the Component Color Cycling is only temporary.

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We also do have another option.

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If we go to the gear icon in the bottom right of Fusion 360, we have something called Component Color Swatch.

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When we select Component Color Swatch, you'll note that both the timeline and the browser change colors but the components on the screen do not.

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So again, if you spend time applying custom appearances or physical materials to your components and you don't really want to change their color,

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you can always use the Component Color Swatch option to change the colorization of the timeline and the browser without affecting the actual model.

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So both of these options can be extremely helpful especially when we begin working with multiple components.

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And again, at any point in time you can toggle it on or off.

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And the colors that you see on your end are likely different than what I see here because it is somewhat random when it first generates these colors.

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But you can always right click on any of them and cycle that component color to another color,

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and make sure that you are getting that contrast between components that are next to each other.

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At this point, I'm going to go back to Inspect and turn off the Component Color Cycling,

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and make sure that I do save this design before moving on to the next step.