Material Library Creation Question

[Dave R]

I'm just wondering if there is a quick and easy way to read a list of color names and their RGB values and create a library. There's at least 120 colors I'd like to have in a library and I'd rather not have to enter each one by hand.

[Jim]

It's fairly easy, can you send the file?

[Dave R]

Hi Jim,

File has been sent.

Thank you.

[Jim]

Here's a quick run-down of how. I'm sure there are better ways, this is the first way that worked. And since it worked, I don't have a need to make it better...

The text file, in this case looks like this (altough Dave's actually was slightly simpler.)

1  Almond  #EFDECD  (239, 222, 205)  1998   
2  Antique Brass  #CD9575  (205, 149, 117)  1998   
3  Apricot  #FDD9B5  (253, 217, 181)  1949   
4  Aquamarine  #78DBE2  (120, 219, 226)  1958   

And here's the Ruby code to read and parse the color file (which I called c.txt so that I would never remember what it was for.)

# I'm working in the tmp folder under the Plugins folder
pf = Sketchup.find_support_file "Plugins"
tf = pf + "/tmp" # a tmp folder 

# Open and read the file into an Array, using a newline as element separator.
# Then, iterate over each element in the array, passing each array element in turn to the variable 'line'
# All code between the do..end loop is executed for each line.
IO.readlines(tf+"/c.txt").each do |line|
  # Here I use a regular expression to find text between the first space (\s) and the # symbol.
  # Then, chop off the # and strip any whitespace before and after the string.
  name = line[ /\s+(.*?)#/ ].chop.strip

  # Another regex
  # Find the text between ( and ), and store it in the 'color' variable.
  color = line[ /\(.*\)/ ]

  # substitute the ( ) and with nothing (remove them from string.)
  # This should really be done with a more correct regex in the previous step.
  color.gsub!(/[)(]/, '')

  # split the sdtring on the ',' and store the split values in r, g, and b variables.
  # split returns an array. Ruby allows multiple assignment for arrays; a, b, c = [1, 2, 3]
  r, g, b = color.split(',')
  
  # Add the material to SketchUp
  m = Sketchup.active_model.materials.add(name)
  # Set the materials color. to_i converts the string to an integer.
  m.color = [r.to_i, g.to_i, b.to_i]
end

[21D]

@dave r said:

I'm just wondering if there is a quick and easy way to read a list of color names and their RGB values and create a library. There's at least 120 colors I'd like to have in a library and I'd rather not have to enter each one by hand.

Hi dave, do you mind sharing that library of named colors??

[Dave R]

I wouldn't mind at all but it turned out I didn't need to make it because Jim already did. You can find it at the link to his blog. I was interested in the Crayola crayon colors which he did a few weeks ago.

It just goes to show there's nothing new under the sun.