Working with material and color names

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When designing a piece of furniture, the constructor conditionally divides furniture parts into the following functional groups: facade parts, body parts or inner parts, where the purchase price is more important than the colour, etc.  So at the initial design stage, materials should be seen as certain abstract material groups without focusing on the specific material names and producers. It is convenient to assign specific materials before starting the production of a piece of furniture, when both the supplier and the selected colours may change. For example, the colour of F01 facade board should be changed to EF6340 Cherry Atakam, and the colour of B01 body should be changed to U129Sherw Black Sherwood Oak, respectively. When the same model of a piece of furniture is used for another order without changing material groups, the piece of furniture may be manufactured using different materials, once the appropriate changes to materials are made. Such last-minute specification of materials can be made using the material replacement procedure in Woodwork for Inventor. Material database in Woodwork for Inventor is presented as a set of abstract material groups rather than database of materials of specific suppliers.

 

This allows:

 

1.Reducing the effort required to create material and colour databases in Autodesk Inventor, since every material description in Woodwork for Inventor has to cover a material or colour created in the material library of Autodesk Inventor.
2.Reducing the number of items covered by the material database in Woodwork for Inventor. This significantly simplifies the handling of the database.
3.Managing the rapidly changing information about the materials supplied and their colours using simpler tools without fearing that the material database will become too extensive and difficult to handle.

 

Note. In the following description of data management of material groups and their assignment to furniture parts, the term material (rather than material group) is used. The purpose of this is to show the users that they can treat a material group as a specific material. This is a conditional grouping and there are no restrictions, except the potential of difficult material database management that may occur where the user adds a lot of new specific materials to the database. This is why we recommend using material replacement functionality, which allows avoiding uncontrollable expansion of the material database.

 

The same replacement concept is used for purchased standard products. Once inserted into the furniture structure, standard components bring in their general codes and names but the user may, up until the last moment, change these names to the component codes and names from a specific manufacturer.