In your Microvellum Factory database, there is a materials table that contains your inventory of materials. Anytime you open a material file this set of materials is copied into your material file interface and will allow you to assign these materials to your material pointers. To manage your materials, you will need to access the material file interface through the Library or Project Specification Groups in the Toolbox Setup drop-down menu.
From there, select the Open Material File icon from the toolbar.
With a material or material category selected, you will have many options available from the right-click context menu. The available options in this menu will change based on whether you are working at the project or library level, and whether you have selected a material or a material category.
Edit Selected Material: This command will allow you to change the properties of your inventory materials. Any change made here will also apply to all materials in all projects in all spec groups. So, if your .25 White Mel material no longer exists and has changed to .25 Eggshell White you can make this change here and all your projects that use .25 White Mel will be updated as well. This applies to all properties of a material.
Add Material: This command will allow you to create a new material. Once the material is created in inventory it will be available in all projects in all specification groups.
Delete Selected Materials: This command will delete the selected material from your inventory. It is important to note that the inventory interface won’t know if a material you are about to delete is currently assigned to a material pointer in a project. If you are in a job and a material was deleted from the inventory, you will get a warning message when a product is being drawn or if you are trying to create a work order and a product uses a deleted material.
Vendors : This menu item allows you to setup or change the vendors that are available for the selected material when using MicroManager. This is where you can also adjust the estimating cost for a selected material.
Adjust Inventory : This is used when working with Microvellum Production.
Copy Selection to Another Category : Will copy the selected material into the designated Category. When working at the project level, this option will be listed as Copy Selection to Project Level Material. Selected materials will be copied to the project level only.
Move Selection to Another Category : Will move material to another category.
Associate Selected Material With Selected Pointer : This assigns materials to material pointers.
Hardware Machine Tokens: This command will allow you to access the machine tokens of a hardware item while on the Hardware Library tab in the material file.
Working with Project Material Files
When accessing a material file on a project level, you will have limited access to what you can change and edit in the material file.
Add Material : If a brand new material is needed for a project, you can use the Add Material menu item to add it to your inventory of materials. This will not only make this material available on this project, but will also add it to your factory inventory and make it available in any other project or spec group.
Associate Selected Material With Selected Pointer : This menu item will allow you to assign a material to any selected material pointer. You can sort the material pointers by selecting the columns, and also highlight multiple material pointers to quickly reassign all pointers using a specific material.
It is important to remember that material pointers and the materials assigned to those pointers will still be different depending on the specification group that is currently open. This will allow you to have different specification groups pre-set with different materials assigned to parts.
Find and Replace Description Inside this Category: This command will allow you to change the name of a material or multiple materials. The find and replace feature is for the user who doesn’t want to setup a large inventory of materials in their interface but still needs to setup project specific material names. With a generic list of materials setup in as the inventory, you can use the find and replace feature to modify the generic name of the material to a project specific material.
So, if your generic inventory name is setup for “.625 Core Open Color”, you can use the Find and Replace command to find “Core Open Color” and replace it with “Orange”. Now in the material file for this spec group only you will see “.625 Orange”. This material name change will also carry through to reports, and manufacturing information. All of the properties for this material are still linked to the “.625 Core Open Color” in the database. So if the thickness is changed from the Advanced Library Setup material file interface this change will apply back all the projects, but in this specification group it will affect the “.625 Orange” material.
Hardware Machine Tokens: This command will allow you to access the machine tokens of a hardware item while on the Hardware Library tab in the material file.