Material location

arail1

Is there a way to select a material in the In the Model library and be able to see where it is in the model?
I downloaded a mattress and pillows from 3D Warehouse and now I have a dozen or so materials that I'm not sure where they are. Clicking on Area shows them all to have 0 sq ft of area but they won't purge.

TIA

remus

They might be applied to edges, whatever it is you should be able to get rid of them by right clicking->delete.

Gaieus

Also, try to purge your components first. There may be things there (like Bryce or Sang unused in the model) and as long as they're still in the component browser, you can't purge their materials and they don't even display and area covered.

If you right click an entity (probably a face - maybe within a group/component) and go to Entity info, you can see what material is applied to it and even go to edit it from there.

arail1

Thanks.

I purged components and that got rid of a lot of material and then I purged materials and I'm down to 3 mystery items - which is better than 12.

I do wish that I could do this in reverse - click on an item in the material library and have SketchUp highlight all instances of the material in the model.

Gaieus

What you can do is to

explode everything (step 3 below will only work in the same context)
draw 3 faces and paint them with those 3 materials
right click > Select > All with same material.
This will select (and highlight) all entities painted with those materials.
There is another chance that you have some groups/components whose inside faces are all painted with something else but the group/component entities are painted with those "mysterious" materials. Since the inside faces are painted with something else, this is not apparent by looking at them.

If you explode everything and then try to do a purge (and of course if this is the case), these materials should also disappear.

Of course, you don't want to get everything exploded so this is just for testing and if works, you can undo everything and simply right click these mysterious materials in the Material browser and delete them - despite the warning that they are in use.

TIG

If you use the GlobalMaterialChanger.rb script you can use it with NO selection so the whole model gets done, enter the 'mystery material' and replace it with <<Default>> (none). You can choose to 'mine' down into all groups and definition/instances etc. It might take awhile on a big model...