Area of Materials grayed out
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When right clicking on materials 'in model' you are able to determine the area of that material within the model. However, I am wondering why the area of some materials appear properly and for other materials the 'area' item is grayed out making it impossible to determine the area of that material?
Also, are there any ruby scripts available to itemize material areas? that could be helpful.
Thanks for any assistance.Mark P
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Is it possible that some materials are applied to components while others are applied to faces?
Edit: That doesn't seem to matter although I get varying results depending upon where the material is applied. I get a larger number if it is applied to the component instead of to the faces.
Is it possible that you're trying to get areas of colors as opposed to textures? I get a greyed out Area entry in the menu if I try to get the area of a color.
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I believe that when they are greyed-out, the materials have a surface area of zero. The reason that they still appear in the material browser and refuse to purge is because they are actually applied to edges. This happens when you triple click geometry, so that the edges also highlight, before you apply a material.
Of course this isn't really apparent if the Edge Style is set to the default of 'All the same'.
To get rid of such materials, just forcibly delete them and the edge will default to black.The program can be a little quirky, though. You can get situations in which clearly visible materials simply refuse to display an area when right-clicked in the browser...although they will if the Area ruby is used.
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It's a bug that appeared in SU7, unless the material has a texture applied to it the menu item is disabled. Very annoying. I posted a bug report here: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=15971&p=124340
Note: I also found that the Area reported is calculated wrong in certain circumstances: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=16083&p=145233
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I finally removed all materials and added back material TEXTURES to determine the various areas. It appears to have worked, but I haven't checked it in real terms. It sure would be nice to be able to get some sort of material area report. The old cost ruby script theoretically was supposed to do that, but it just gives a cost value of $0. The Google generate report function in the file menu exports a summary that has a Material area header, but there are no values given in the column. Maybe there's just some inherent problem with a material summary given the groups and components issues. I'm not a ruby scripter, so I'm out of luck here.
Thanks for any help,
Mark -
I have an Area Report plugin in the workings. But it's currently in a non-functional state as I made some changes to it which isn't complete yet.
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Don't you guys already have an area report on the context menu? I can select a face then ask for the area of that material, the selection or the layer. I can't remember whether it's a Ruby or part of the program.
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Yes, it's a built in feature. But the menu in the Material browser is bugged. And SU's Area calculations are wrong if the group/component is skewed.
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