Fix Inventor’s Bad Material Name Bug

Bad Material Name Fix

The bad Material name error, as can be seen in the image below, is caused by Inventor itself.

For some unknown reason, inventor will lose track of the Material and Appearance Library settings, and revert back to using the default Inventor Material Library, as can be seen in this image of the project editor…

The settings above should have Cabinetmaker in bold, not the default Inventor Material Library. the solution is to set them both (if applicable) back to Cabinetmaker. To do so, just double click each instance of the Cabinetmaker library.

 I remove the other libraries, but I’m not sure if it helps. the reason they are there in this case is because Inventor lost track of the cabinetmaker library, and added the default libraries back to the list and used one of them instead. It is a bug that Autodesk is aware of. Anyway, with the Project File set to the correct library, go back to the offending file, in this case it was Base_Drawer_Front.iam, an assembly, so we need to expand the assembly and click on the individual parts to give them focus, then click the Material ‘Meatball’…

…which will bring up the Material Browser. If the setting is on anything but your preferred library, in this case, Cabinetmaker, use the little House icon drop-down to switch to the correct library.

Libraries are a perpetual headache with Inventor. Hopefully they will be fixed with the next release, but don’t hold your breath. You should now be able to skip the project file step, and just go directly to the Material Browser if this happens again, but any time the ‘bad material name’ error shows up, either the library is not set as in this case, or you have an iLogic rule that creates the material name, but is blank for some reason.