Newbie alert: Only able to keep one feature of a body active at one time

[jttrey3]

Hello,

I have been watching many videos and following along to learn the product, and I am loving it. I am trying to model a battery. It is a rectangle which I padded, then colored specific faces. I then added two pockets, and colored the face of each (red and black). I then added a chamfer around the top edge. However, If the chamfer is active, then the pad and the two pockets become inactive. If I activate any other feature (I hope this is the correct term), only that feature stays active. While this seems like expected behavior, the color changes I make to faces only appear when that feature is active.

See attached screehshots and file.

I am sure I have probably done something foolish, but I cannot determine what, nor has my googling hound any answers.

I am using the .19 Appimage for Linux, with no additions or modifications.
OS: Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS (ubuntu:GNOME/ubuntu)
Word size of OS: 64-bit
Word size of FreeCAD: 64-bit
Version: 0.19.24291 (Git) AppImage
Build type: Release
Branch: (HEAD detached at 0.19.2)
Hash: 7b5e18a0759de778b74d3a5c17eba9cb815035ac
Python version: 3.8.8
Qt version: 5.12.9
Coin version: 4.0.0
OCC version: 7.4.0
Locale: English/United States (en_US)


Sadly, I am not even sure I have learned enough to ask the right questions. Any assistance would be appreciated.

Thank you

John

[chrisb]

Hi and welcome to the forum!

Colors are indeed a per feature property, so it is best to leave coloring until the very end of the modeling.

Besides, your wording is misleading - or show that you are mislead: You don't activate features, you make them visible. They are not standalone objects, they describe subsequent steps in the modeling process.
We use the word activate for bodies, which switches a body into a state where the next feature goes into.

[jttrey3]

Thank you Chrisb.

I appreciate the information and context. I will skip colors until the end and adjust my terminology accordingly.

[Cekuhnen]

Also names can be tricky

You cannot have the same name twice

Often I don’t name features and only the body.

[chrisb]

Also names can be tricky

You cannot have the same name twice

Often I don’t name features and only the body.

First: you have to distinguish between the name and the label of an object. You cannot change the names at all, they are always unique. You can change the labels and they even can be identical, although I don't recommend that at all. I don't know what happens if you have identical labels and use these in an expression.
Second: the names of the objects are completely independent from the coloring discussed here. You may have heard of the topological naming problem, which talks of "names" as well, but these are the internally used identifiers for the faces, edges, vertices, which are always numbers.