Why is it that if you apply an appearance to a body, and then mirror that body, the materials on the mirrored body are applied to the faces of the body, not to the body itself? Am I making sense? It seems logical (and very common practice) that you would model half of a symetrical part, apply all the detail & materials, and then at the end mirror bodies to complete the part. I find that as a rule, its is simpler and cleaner to apply materials to bodies (or parts) rather than faces... unless, of course, the material is only applied to the surface of the object in real life (like paint).

Solid modelling is all about treating components of the model as solid blocks, meaning you can cut into that shape to create internal faces... which logically should have the same material attributes as the parent body. Is it therefore not completely illogical for mirrorred bodies to have materials applied at face level? It can make for an extremely confusing Appearance Feature Manager tree... which is confusing at the best of times.

Is it just an oversight by solidworks?

Incidentally, the same thing happens if you mirror a feature... which in this case makes sense, as mirror bodies don't have 'features' as such. This is the only way it can work.

Am interested in hearing what others think,

Thanks, Tom