Naming Material Strangeness....
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Can anyone point me in the right direction on this one.
I am creating a bunch of new materials by importing the jpeg then saving as skm. Sketchup isn't letting me save directly into the material folder of the program so I am saving to desktop then moving. Side question: Is this the only way to do this?
My main question is: when I copy the materials into the appropriate SU materials folder it all looks fine. Inside the folder the names appear as I have named them originally. When I close and open SU and go to these new materials I can see them in the material window but their names appear as generic names such as Material 23 instead of "AC Plywood" for instance. I tried AC_Plywood with same result.
Materials I did in previous versions of SU display correctly. What am I doing wrong.
Thanks for any help you can provide. Hopefully I explained this precisely enough.
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Looks like I found it. I was neglecting to enter a name in the material window when creating the new material. I was assuming that the file name would be displayed but it seems I missed the step of naming it inside the SU material browser.
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With the method I use to create new materials in SketchUp, the image's file name automatically becomes the material name. I don't have to type anything in SketchUp to set it.
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I would love to know if you have a more streamlined process because this is taking a lot longer than it should (in my opinion).
What is taking the most time is I am scaling each image so they are close to what they should be in reality. For instance on a texture for T&G planks I am scaling the image so that the image of each board is 5.5". I am also making a unique texture for both vertical and horizontal orientations. I am trying to avoid having to scale the texture each time I use it in the future. Seems like there are a lot of steps to make this happen in my flow. This is of course a tangent frustration not related to the naming but perhaps your workflow might eliminate a step or two if you were willing to share.
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Making horizontal AND vertical versions of materials is a colossal waste of time up front and it can be another waste of time later on. You only need one version. My process is out lined here. With the way I do it, I don't have to adjust the scale of the texture once I have it imported into SketchUp. In fact I don't even need to have the Materials edit window open because I don't do anything with it. Typically I make a batch of materials of a single species and then save the batch as a collection in one go. Add it to Favorites and it's available for later.
BTW, for my use, those little square material images of wood just don't cut it. Your needs may be different and those squares might work fine for you.
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Thanks Dave for sharing your process. My needs are a little different since I am working with materials right now that deal with hundreds of square feet (tile, flooring, T&G, fencing, decking, etc) so I really need something that will tile reasonably well. I am also using images where I didn't take the photo so I don't know the dimension of the incoming image so I think I am still bound to try to match an approximate scale to the image.
That being said I have never seen or used the "create collection" button. That is a definite time saver. Thanks so much!!
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I expected you would need tiling images but you should still be able to use my basic method. For tiles and decking and such, you should be able to get a pretty good idea of the area covered by the sizes of the materials and how much of them are shown. If you an image of 6" square tiles and there are 4 of them, you ought to be close enough putting that image on a 12" square.
Good luck with it.
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Yup I pretty much have been using your method with an extra step (or different step anyway) to try and get the image as close to real life as possible which is what you describe above.
They are all unique so I have to evaluate each one. I then scale the object to its smallest repeating size, name it, and make it a unique texture. Rotate it 90 and save another unique texture. I know you think this is a waste of time but rotating wood grain is something that drives me crazy for some reason. I would rather do it once and then never have to do it again (almost). Your process saved me from having to save each texture individually which is great. Thanks again for taking the time to help me out.
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Just remember if you use two different versions of a material (horizontal and vertical), you increase the file size and potentially reduce performance and speed. If you have to edit the materials, you have to edit them both. You waste even more time that way. Applying and aligning a material isn't at all difficult to do in the model and once you've set it to each required orientation, you just sample the needed orientation when applying the material to other faces. Still, as with most other things in SketchUp, you can choose how you want to invest your time and how much to invest.
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