How to use SOLIDWORKS Assembly Appearance Overrides

SOLIDWORKS Assembly Appearance Overrides allow you to apply different colours/textures/display styles to your components only in the specific assembly you’re working in, without affecting the original part files.  The Display Pane is very useful to visualize these overrides and provides ways to remove them.

Expand the Display Pane by clicking the arrow at the top right corner of the FeatureManager Design Tree.  The lower right triangles under the appearance column show the part/subassembly appearance.  The upper left triangles are appearances applied in this particular assembly as an override.

Component Overrides shown in Display Pane

To remove an individual override, you can click on the upper triangle and choose “Remove Appearance”.

Remove Component Appearance Override

To remove all component overrides, you can click in the Appearance column at the top of the tree and choose “Remove All Component Appearances”.

Remove All Component Appearance Overrides

When it comes to subassemblies, you can also override appearances (and Hide/Show, Display Style, Transparency) to individual components of the subassembly.

• The subcomponents with solid icons in the Display Pane have overrides in this top level assembly (Cardon Joint.sldasm).
• The subcomponents that have faded icons may show overrides, but these are overrides applied in the subassembly level (full_crank-assy_&.sldasm).

Overrides of Subassembly Components – also applied Transparency and Shaded overrides

If I open the subassembly, you’ll notice the only the yellow override is included as this was at the subassembly level.

Subassembly Level Override

To clear any individual subassembly component overrides applied the top level, so you don’t need to expand all subassemblies to check, you can right-click anywhere in the Display Pane and choose ‘Clear All Top Level Overrides’

Clear All Top Level Overrides

This will remove all the SOLIDWORKS Assembly Appearance Overrides applied to individual components within the subassembly, but only from this top level assembly.  So now all of the subcomponents will show as faded icons.

All Top Level Overrides Removed