Assign material color (journal maybe?)

[mcclark]

What I'd like to do is whenever I assign a material to a particular part, it changes the color of that part according to the material. For example, steel parts would be blue, aluminum would be green, wood would would be brown, un-assigned parts would be gray, etc. It's my understanding that this functionality does not exist in the base NX program, but can be done with journals. I think the easiest approach would be to create an excel spreadsheet table with 2 columns. The first column lists all the materials in the material library and the second column would have a color. Then when the journal runs, it finds the material attribute of each part in the assembly, goes into the excel spreadsheet to determine a color for that particular material, and then change the color of the part to that color.

I think that's how it should work but I have no experience writing journals. Does anyone have something they use already or have any ideas for how to code this? I saw a reply by cowski in a thread that had a similar question, but it was from 2014 and the journal file that cowski posted no longer was active. Thanks for any help.

I'm running NX11 and TC11.

 

[cowski]

I think that you are referring to this thread:
thread561-365135

If so, here is an updated link to the code:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/x6y1uu0sdwlbjk0/component_color_from_excel.vb?dl=0

www.nxjournaling.com

 

[mcclark]

That's exactly what I was talking about, thanks cowski.

However, now that I'm looking at it, it isn't 100% what I'm looking for. I'm looking for something that goes thru each part within my assembly, finds the material assigned to that part, references an excel spreadsheet that has a list of possible materials and the associated color, then changes the part to the appropriate color.

So I'm looking for something that'll automatically go thru each part and change color based on the material, not the component name. The goal is color consistency across models, regardless of who the designer is. So blue parts will always be steel and green parts are always aluminum. So not only can you quickly see what everything is made of without having to query each one, but you can easily see if you forgot to add a material to a part because it wont have a color.

Sorry for the confusion and hopefully there's something that already exists for this.