Appearance provides rendering information about a 3D surface to a format viewer. Appearance may detail the color of the surface, the reaction of the surface to lighting, or provide a texture, which is applied in conjunction with the texture coordinates.
Appearance may be shared between surfaces, including across features. Each surface has one appearance reference per side. An appearance reference of 0 represents a part with no appearance. The appearance reference references a common appearance that may be shared between many surfaces.
A collection of surfaces, such as IFMEMultiSurface, IFMECompositeSurface, or IFMEMesh, may store a default appearance at the parent level for each side, this value is inherited by all children with no appearance set. In the case of multiple inheritance, the child surface inherits the appearance of the nearest parent who contains an appearance.
FME supports translation of surfaces with appearance support from one format to another, provided the format itself supports appearance. The extent of appearance support is limited by the level of support within each format for appearance. Currently, the following FME-supported formats contain Appearance Support:
For additional information on these formats, click FME Readers and Writers in the FME Desktop help window.