Get the perfect color for your models with SOLIDWORKS 2021 and the new COLOR PICKER

By

SOLIDWORKS 2021 was released on Monday, October 5, 2020, and it had some terrific enhancements! One of my favorites is the addition of the COLOR PICKER tool. This tool allows users to easily match the color of their SOLIDWORKS model to any other color on the screen.
For example, let’s say we created a mug with the default SOLIDWORKS gray color:

We now want make this mug a little more realistic, so we assign an appearance from the default appearance library: BONE CHINA

This is a great for a start, but I want to impress my “customer” by applying colors to the model that perfectly match their company theme. So I’m going to create a new display state, and create another version of this mug in a different color.
Let’s say my “customer” is SOLIDWORKS, and I want to perfectly match the RED color shown in the banner of their website:

SOLIDWORKS 2021 makes this process easier than ever. To perfectly match the color of the banner on the SOLIDWORKS website, I can follow these steps:

1. Click the Icon for appearance in my heads-up toolbar


2. Bring up the SOLIDOWORKS website (or any image) so I easily see/select the color I am hoping to capture:


3. Left click the icon for COLOR PICKER (it looks like an eye dropper)

After left clicking on this icon, HOLD DOWN the left mouse button on the mouse, and DRAG the mouse to the desired color:

4. After dragging the mouse onto the red SOLIDWORKS banner, let go of the left mouse button, and that perfect SOLIDWORKS RED is assigned to the model:

WOW – that looks great! And I now have 2 versions of the mug, one in BONE CHINA, and one in SOLIDWORKS RED.
But I want to give my customer some different options, so I’m going to create one more display state, and this time I’m going to try to capture the deep blue color shown on the Dassault Systemes logo:

So once again I will click the Icon for APPEARANCE, and the drag and drop from the COLOR PICKER icon (looks like an eye dropper) up to the desired color – in this case the blue shown in the Dassault Systemes logo:

After dragging over the desired BLUE color, I let go of the mouse.

And I’m now left with a terrific result, perfectly matching the blue color of our customer’s company theme. We now have three great options for our customer to choose from.

SOLIDWORKS 2021 introduced some great new functionality, and one of my favorite time savers is this new COLOR PICKER option. In previous versions of SOLIDWORKS we would have to somehow capture the RGB formula for a custom color. This often meant working with an additional piece of software, and a lot of copying and pasting. This was a time-consuming process, especially when trying to capture many different colors. But SOLIDWORKS 2021 simplifies this process down to just a few clicks!

 

Toby Schnaars

Toby Schnaars

Toby Schnaars is a Solution Consultant at Dassault Systemems SOLIDWORKS, based in the Northeastern region of the United States. He has been helping customers with SOLIDWORKS tips, tricks and instructor-led training since 2001.