How do I find a problematic Sketchup Material?

halroach

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.