Selection by material: is there a plugin for this?

[Edson]

i wanted to select a number of elements by their material and then erase them but could not find a plugin for this. i ran a search here and came out empty handed. would anyone know of a plugin that does that?

[TIG]

You can use the built-in context-menu to select active geometry - Select a face with desired material, 'Select with same Material'
It doesn't do Groups/Instances.
This will do it...

model=Sketchup.active_model
ss=model.selection
material=ss[0].material ### of 1st thing already selected
ss.clear
model.active_entities.each{|e|ss.add(e) if e.material==material}

[Edson]

thanks, tig. you are always fast and tremendously helpful.

should i place that code in the ruby console and run it or what?

[TIG]

@edson said:

thanks, tig. you are always fast and tremendously helpful.

should i place that code in the ruby console and run it or what?

Make a plain text file called selectbysamematerial.rb in ../Plugins/
[I know you are a Mackie so find where that is ]
then paste this code into it [I've added some extra bits to make it a easier to use]

require 'sketchup.rb'
def selectbysamematerial()
  model=Sketchup.active_model
  ss=model.selection
  material=ss[0].material ### of 1st thing already selected
  ss.clear
  model.active_entities.each{|e|ss.add(e) if e.material==material}
end#def

to use or test type/paste into the Ruby Console selectbysamematerial
To add a menu item paste this at the end of the file

if not file_loaded?(File.basename(__FILE__))
  UI.menu("Plugins").add_item("Select by Same Material"){selectbysamematerial()}
end
file_loaded(File.basename(__FILE__))

You can change the menu item text to "Selecione pelo Mesmo Material" if you like...

[Edson]

hi tig,

thanks so much again. i followed your instructions but got the message below. i probably botched it somehow, ignoramus in ruby matters that i am. please find the script attached.

---

---

selectbysamematerial.rb

[thomthom]

I added such a feature for the next iterations of Selection Toys a couple of days ago - though it's not released yet.

[TIG]

@edson said:

hi tig,
thanks so much again. i followed your instructions but got the message below. i probably botched it somehow, ignoramus in ruby matters that i am. please find the script attached.

Here it is corrected - you somehow had go '? ' at the start of every line of code rather than ' ' ??? selectbysamematerial.rb

[Edson]

tig,

it works like a charm. thanks again.

[Didier Bur]

My "quick selection tool" does this also, and more

[Edson]

@didier bur said:

My "quick selection tool" does this also, and more

didier,
to tell you the truth, my first try was with your quick selection tool – it used to be a very handy tool for me in the past – but it did not work. it never worked perfectly on my mac but after the release of 7.1 it became almost useless: the only thing i manage to select with it are components. at least for me, it will not select any materials.

[Didier Bur]

It seems that I have more and more updates to do, and not enough time for it now