Silent material failures — gull system handbook

Material names are language-specific, a material brings its own appearance, and a texture is written onto the body. What gull system handles and what it does not.

Silent material failures

Three things the CAD does quietly. gull system handles two of them for you; the third is yours to watch.

What gull system handles for you

• ⚠ Material names are language-specific. A Czech CAD installation knows "1023 Plech z uhlíkaté oceli (SS)" and refuses the English name for the same material. Some names do match across languages ("AISI 304" is the same in both), which is worse than if none did — the setup passes your test and fails on the material one row down. For every material from a Dassault library, gull system also remembers its number (matid), which is the same in every language. At generation time it looks up what that material is called on this machine and sends that name, so a configurator built on a Czech installation runs on an English one.
• ⚠ A material brings its own appearance. Assign stainless and the CAD also repaints the part in a steel shade — overwriting any colour or texture that was there. gull system handles this by always sending the material first, so the colour your customer chose stays on top. There is nothing for you to do; it is just worth knowing why it behaves that way.
• ⚠ A material and a texture do coexist. A part can carry stainless and a tinted texture at the same time — the mass from the material, the picture from the texture. What makes that work is the CAD's appearance hierarchy: assembly → face → feature → body → part. A material's appearance sits at part level, so a texture written at the same level competes with it and loses. On a part that carries a material, gull system therefore writes the texture one level down, on the body, where the hierarchy says it wins.

What is yours to watch

• ⚠ Custom libraries carry no material number. The stored name is used for them. They have no language problem either, since you wrote them.
• ⚠ A texture written onto a body stays there. It stays even when a later order sends only a colour to the same part — the body sits higher in the hierarchy, so it covers the colour. That is the price of gull system never deleting appearances you set on bodies yourself. If you need to switch cleanly between a texture and a plain colour, put the rule on the body instead.

Worth knowing

• Mass changes immediately. After a material is assigned there is nothing to regenerate: the mass, the cut list and the title block figures match the new material at once.
• Custom material libraries work. If you keep your own library beside Dassault's, gull system finds it and offers it like the others. Just remember that which library a material came from is stored with the entry.