Appearances

The first “beach ball” icon  is the Appearances icon. When you select a face, then select Appearances, SOLIDWORKS reveals a hierarchy of appearances for the selected item. On a solid, the face belongs to itself, a feature, a body, and the part. All parts have a default appearance, so you will always see that appearance as a swatch of color on the “part” line. If you want to override that appearance, select the level you want to affect. In the illustration below, we are going to change a fillet from being gray (the part color) to red.




We can take this a bit further as well. Selecting a face, then selecting Appearances, and finally selecting the face “line item” allows us to override again, this time making the face yellow, as below:





So, the hierarchy for Appearance is as follows: Part is overridden by Body which is overridden by Feature which is overridden by Face.
You can also use more “beach ball” icons to copy and paste an appearance.
Select a face, then choose Copy Appearance .
Next, pick another face and choose Paste Appearance .
When you paste, a pop-up will appear letting you choose the target, including Body, Feature, and Face.







To remove an appearance at any level, bring up the Appearances list by selecting a face and clicking the red “X”. If you want to remove all appearances and set back to just part appearance, click that item at the bottom, as highlighted below:


Finally, while I am using color for my examples, there are other aspects to appearance, such as transparency, which can be revealed on the Advanced tab of the Appearances PropertyManager.