Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Change Reflection for Shiny Parts

Issue:
When you apply a shiny color to a part file you see what appears to be a parking lot in the reflective surfaces.  Is there a way to turn that off?

Solution:
You can change the Reflective Environment file to use a more subtle reflection image by going to the Tools tab and clicking the Application Options button. From there you click the Colors tab and then use the browse button to select a different *.DDS file to use.  I prefer the one called Chrome.dds.

The Parking Lot reflection is the default for many color styles:



You can change it to use something more subtle such as the one called Chrome.

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A good way to test each reflective environment file is to create a half circle and revolve it 360 degrees to form a sphere. This will allow you to see what the image contains or doesn't contain. Here the ParkingLot.dds shows one of the Autodesk developers on his motorcycle.

You can also find a tip on how to turn off the reflections and gradients in drawing files at this link: http://inventortrenches.blogspot.com/2011/02/disable-reflections-and-gradients-in.html