Getting the color of an animation component (drawsurrogate) to use the color defined in Flexsim

Hi, I got this hint from Phil at Flexsim.

When you make animations in Flexsim using the animation editor (Right click on object and then select Edit->Animations. Also have the View->Animations and Components window open) you often have multiple 3D shapes inside each other, e.g. a robot with multiple links. Often you want all these components to be the same color and to change color depending on what color is set to the main object in Flexsim. To achieve this you create your animation using the components and then remove the subnodes to the color nodes inside drawsurrogate components (created by the animator) for all the 3D shapes that you want to change color according to the Flexsim main object color. Do not delete the color node itself. See the attached attached image.

Also, remember that your 3D shapes need to be properly set up to use the color defined in Flexsim, i.e. either use the default material in Google Sketchup or use the hint in the user manual:

for .3ds and .ac files, you can have the FlexSim object's color bleed through on certain shapes in the file. You can do this in one of two ways: (1) give the shape an ambient color value of rgb: (0.235,0.235,0.243) in your 3D software, (2) append "_fsclr" to the end of the shape's material name in your 3D software.