Autodesk Showcase - Create New Faces for New Colors

“The hole and the patch should be commensurate”
Thomas Jefferson

There are times when I'm working in Autodesk Showcase that I find I need to change the color of a portion of a face, and I'm not able to do so.

For example, here's a model I built in Autodesk Inventor.  It has the KETIV logo on it, which I'd like to change it to red. When I select the model, the entire model highlights

I just want to select the letters!

Usually this is because the faces were imported as a single color, and Showcase "unified" them.

So what to do?  I could open the file in Autodesk Inventor, copy faces or change color there, and update the CAD model.  But Showcase has a tool that can do this for us, without having to fall back to a CAD tool.

Extract Patches as New Objects.  This tool copies faces and creates new ones that can have Showcase materials applied to them.

Extract Patches as New Objects will do the trick!

 Once the patches are selected, all that's left to do is select which patches to extract!

Extracting the patches

And these colors of these faces can be changed separately from the faces they were copied from!

Now the patches can be selected separately

For a little more detail, here's the video portion!  Enjoy!

And if you have a tip on how you might approach this challenge, leave a comment!