Total weirdness in dynamic component textures

[Kent L]

In my everlasting quest to get material textures to behave properly in dynamic components (keeping material unscaled when scaling a lumber piece) I've discovered some bizarre weirdness.

Sketchup definitely has some work to do on the dynamic component system.

First off, in order for the material choice system to work with a dynamic component, the original component must be colored with the default material. (see the the "set material to paint with default" button in the materials browser) Then you can make a pick list of materials in the dynamic attributes and apply them to components through the "component options" context menu.

You can apply different textures to different instances of the same dynamic component, just like you can scale each instance independently of one another. HOWEVER, a bizarre thing happens if you copy an existing dynamic component rather than dragging a new instance from the component browser. In other words, if you drag a component from the browser and then make copies of that component using ctrl-move, the behavior is different than that which occurs if you drag each new instance from the browser.

If you copy a component and change the color of the first instance of the component, the material changes on all the other copies. If you change the material of the copies, they do not affect each other. However, if you drag each component from the browser, they are all independent from one another. Totally bizarre and can lead to some real strange behavior.

Sketchup REALLY needs to expand and fix the materials attributes in dynamic components. If they could just allow you to scale a dynamic component without scaling the texture, the dynamic component system would be FAR more useful.