How do I find a problematic Sketchup Material?

halroach

Hello

I am using Maxwell Render along with Sketchup. Every now and then I get the following type of error within Maxwell Render:

ERROR; - File "D;/metal/metal-alucobond-white-r.jpg" has not been found. Render cannot continue.

I am unable to continue rendering until the texture is either miraculously found, or if I delete the problematic material from Sketchup.

The sketchup material is linking to a D drive (which is a DVD drive), meaning it is not a texture that I created. It is probably a material that came with one of the hundreds of components that I imported into my model.

The Problem IS:
I cannot find which sketchup material is causing the problem! I have a model with 40-50 materials in it. I have gone over each of the 40-50 materials to see if they are linked to a material by that name "metal-alucobond-white-r.jpg" but it doesn't appear anywhere!
If I delete all the materials in the model the problem will be solved! but then I have to reassign materials... that is not a good solution!
In the passed I have a problematic texture called grass.jpg. so I deleted all the green and grass materials until the problem was solved. But I can't seem to find a straight forward way to find the material.

I tried generating a report to see if anything might be listed in there, but the model is too heavy, and the report just jams sketchup.
generating a report with a simple model doesn't seem to fill in textures in any case.

Anyone have a solution?
Maybe there is a way through a ruby script, to list all materials and linked textures within a model?

Good Day

Ecuadorian

Have you tried purging the model?

I don't use Maxwell, but perhaps this could work:

Create a metal-alucobond-white-r.jpg file with MS Paint, and burn it to a CD inside a folder called metal.

halroach

@ecuadorian said:

Have you tried purging the model?

I don't use Maxwell, but perhaps this could work:

Create a metal-alucobond-white-r.jpg file with MS Paint, and burn it to a CD inside a folder called metal.

I've tired purging. It doesn't help
That will work, but it's not worth the trouble, since errors like this happen quite often!

The best solution is to find the problematic material, but how!?

Ecuadorian

Just found this post... might give you a clue.

http://www.sketchucation.com/forums/scf/viewtopic.php?p=8442#p8442

thomthom

Open the Ruby Console, type in


Sketchup.active_model.materials.each { |m| puts m.name + ' - ' m.texture.filename }

halroach

@thomthom said:

Open the Ruby Console, type in


> Sketchup.active_model.materials.each { |m| puts m.name + ' - ' m.texture.filename }
>

I am not very familiar with Ruby Code. If I'm supposed to add something, substitue something let me know.
Typing in the above code as is gives an error.


Error; #<SyntaxError; (eval);131; compile error
(eval);131; syntax error
Sketchup.active_model.materials.each { |m| puts m.name + ' - ' m.texture.filename }

What am I supposed to see after the code is executed?

thomthom

Sorry, my bad. Didn't check the code first.
This works:
Sketchup.active_model.materials.each { |m| puts m.name + ' - ' + m.texture.filename if m.texture != nil }

It will return a list of textured materials with their name and the filepath.

HPW

Nice code snippet!

But why are there material names in different format:
<.....>
[.....]
.....

And is this the only possibility to see filepath?
In SU material editor I only see filename.
But when I get a SKP from other users there is a embedded material where the path does not exist on my PC.

thomthom

< and [ are just some naming conventions. I think some of SU's default materials uses these characters.

I don't know of any other means to find out the file path.

Some times there isn't a filepath. It's just the name.

SU always embed the texture into SU. But some times stores the location of the original texture. Not sure why though. But render engines some times uses that path to load the textures. Since SU downsamples the images the original might be a higher resolution. But, as I've noticed with V-Ray, if the file doesn't exists it'll return an error instead of falling back to extracting the embedded image.

halroach

Thank you Thomthom!
Your script worked very well and it helped me re diagnose my problem.
Apparently Sketchup wasn't the problem maker, all textures were well defined and linked.

For those who are interested, the problem was (and still is) as follows:
I had a material in my model named '<white>' - which when exporting to Maxwell - using 'Auto MXM conversion' - was pointing to a problematic MXM - a material within my Maxwell material libraries (which is apparently called '<white>'!?!?).
I went through a lot of trouble to find which material IN SKETCHUP was causing the problem, and I am currently in correspondence with the Maxwell Support Team to figure out a way to quickly find the problematic MXM in my libraries, since I don't have any MXM called white, but rather a bunch of MXMs that include white in their name.

So, a temporary solution to get the render going is to delete the material called <white> in the sketchup model, and redefine parts of the model that were affected. How to find that <white> (or any other texture for that matter) was making the problem, we have yet to discover...

silver_shadow

hi there...nice script...any way to make a button for this, then we dont have to copy and paste every time, thanx

TIG

@unknownuser said:

So, a temporary solution to get the render going is to delete the material called <white> in the sketchup model, and redefine parts of the model that were affected. How to find that <white> (or any other texture for that matter) was making the problem, we have yet to discover...

You could always go into the SUp material-browser, model-tab, pick the problem material's icon, edit and then rename <white> as <HALwhite> (or whatever) to avoid the glitch after export... That way the parts of the model aren't affected at all as their colour etc stays as it was - only that material's name has changed to protect the innocent/guilty...

halroach

@tig said:

You could always go into the SUp material-browser, model-tab, pick the problem material's icon, edit and then rename <white> as <HALwhite> (or whatever) to avoid the glitch after export... That way the parts of the model aren't affected at all as their colour etc stays as it was - only that material's name has changed to protect the innocent/guilty...

Yep, that works too - sometimes!
I have played around with changing the problematic material's name. Some times it works sometimes it doesn't. I tried renaming to other names which include the word white, like '<White>XXX', and it still failed intermitently. Either I did something wrong, or actually having the string 'White' in the material name calls the problematic material in Maxwell... haven't recreated the problem yet.

silver_shadow

this happened to me too when i tried importing to maxwell part by part from sketchup, thought it was going to be easier. It was a nightmare. I couldnt bring it all at once into maxwell(preferable way to go) my model was too big. And it kept telling me this material is already there, ignore or replace it and i chose ignore it, because its alreday there.Kinda got the same error messages when i try to render and ends up rendering just checkerboards.So i dont know if your model may be the same result of importing just bits and pieces to make up a full model.

thomthom

@silver_shadow said:

hi there...nice script...any way to make a button for this, then we dont have to copy and paste every time, thanx

Yea. I'll see when I can squeeze it in.

skateboardtshirt

I had a similar problem where I are getting this message every time I tried to save: "*** Problems were found that could not be fixed! *** The name for CMaterial (290526) is not valid". It would still let me save the file though. I was able to solve the problem by opening the materials window and hovering over each material to look at the name. I found 3 materials that somehow had blank names. After renaming those materials the problem went away.

I don't know how those blank named materials got there in the first place though, I tried to recreate the problem but SketchUp won't let you name a material with a blank name.