Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Disable Reflections and Gradients in Shaded Drawing Views

Issue:
When you create a drawing view of a part it shows a gradient reflection that is not present in the model. This can cause confusion concerning paint color specification and sometimes feature representation, depending on the geometry involved.

Solution:
Autodesk has provided a method for disabling these reflections in the form of a registry edit. To change this behavior you can add a DWORD registry key named "Suppress Specular Color" with any  value greater than zero.

(Note: if you looking for how to turn off the reflective image used for shiny parts in the model you can find that tip here: http://inventortrenches.blogspot.com/2011/03/change-reflection-for-shiny-parts.html)





































For Inventor 2010:
To get this to work with Inventor 2010, you need to have Service Pack 3 for 2010 installed first, and then you need to install hotfix15338178

Creating the registry Key: 
1). Open the system registry and locate the following registry keys listed below (Start > Run > RegEdit):

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Autodesk\Inventor\RegistryVersion14.0\Applets\DrawingLayout\Preferences\]

2). Create a key with this value:

"Suppress Specular Color"=dword:00000001

3.) Restart Inventor




For Inventor 2011:
To get this to work for Inventor 2011, you need to have Service Pack 1 for 2011 installed first.

Creating the registry Key:
1). Open the system registry and locate the following registry keys listed below (Start > Run > RegEdit):

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Autodesk\Inventor\RegistryVersion15.0\Applets\DrawingLayout\Preferences\]

2). Create a key with this value:

"Suppress Specular Color"=dword:00000001

3.) Restart Inventor



Here are some screen captures of the registry edit for Inventor 2010 (you can click them to enlarge).