Component color swatch and colors cycling. In this video, we'll use component color cycling, modify a component's color, and enable component color swatch. In Fusion 360, we want to carry on with our gear reduction housing assembly. At this point, what we've done is, we've converted a couple bodies to components, and we've used a script to generate three separate spur gears. Everything in Fusion 360 by default, will take on a default physical material and its appearance. In most cases, unless you've changed this, it'll be a gray steel material. When you begin working with assemblies that have a large number of components, for example, we have multiple covers, housings in gears in this assembly, all at the same gray. This can be difficult for us to identify certain components. If we want to begin working on something, we can activate it and change the opacity. But at the very top level, it's hard for us to identify what each of these components is. One way that we can get around that is by using inspect and something called component color cycling toggle. This can also be found on the Tools menu under component colors cycle toggle in the Inspect section. What we're going to do is, we're going to turn on component color cycling, and we're going to take a look at what happens to all of the different bodies and components in design. First, let's take a look at the timeline at the bottom. You'll see a large green bar that's placed above a large number of features. That green bar represents the top level of the design. Because all of these bodies were created originally in the design as bodies, they all fall under that green bar until we began creating components. You can see here that we have our housing mount. That housing mount was created by extruding a solid body as a new component. Then you can see that we converted multiple bodies to components again under that green color. Then you can see that we move them under our housing empty component. When we have these sub components, you can see the top level housing color. Then you can see individual colors for things like the spur gears and then things like capture position that happened at the top level. Not only does this colorize the timeline at the bottom, but it also places that color in the browser, as well as on the components themselves. This can be extremely helpful in terms of visualizing. There are some cases where certain components will have very similar colors. Let's go ahead and hide the housing mount and the entire housing and take a look at just the gears. You'll notice that there are various shades of red. The larger gear, the 48 tooth is a darker red, and then we're transitioning to more of a pink and then a tan color. If we want to identify these with more unique colors, we can right click on any of them and use these cycle component color option. Now the yellow stands out a little bit more than just the red did. We can bring back our housing and we can see that color a little bit easier. If we want to turn this off at any point in time, we can use Shift and N on the keyboard or go back to our component colors cycle toggle. It will go back to that default gray appearance. If we modify things like the appearances or the physical materials of any component, those will stay with those components as the component color cycling is only temporary. We also do have another option. If we go to the gear icon in the bottom right of Fusion 360, we have something called component color swatch. When we select component color swatch, you'll note that both the timeline and the browser change colors, but the components on the screen do not. Again, if you spend time applying custom appearances or physical materials to your components and you don't really want to change the color, you can always use the component color swatch option to change the colorization of the timeline and the browser without affecting the actual model. Both of these options can be extremely helpful, especially when we begin working with multiple components. Again, at any point in time, you can toggle it on or off. The colors that you see on your end are likely different than what I see here, because it is somewhat random when it first generates these colors. But you can always right click on any of them, and cycle that component color to another color and make sure that you are getting that contrast between components that are next to each other. At this point, I'm going to go back to inspect and turn off the component color cycling and make sure that I do save this design before moving on to the next step.
