Materials

[tald311]

Hello,

We just loaded SketchUp 7.1 onto a friends system. He was using SU version 5 for some reason

Anyway, he has an extensive material library. We set the path to materials but when we they wont show up in the paintbuck. Any ideas why?

TY
Dan Tal

[dylan]

Have you placed all these materials in the materials folder C:\ProgramFiles\Google\Google Sketchup 7\Materials

[tald311]

Yeah, they are still in sub fodlers but they are in the Google SketchUp 7 materials folder. I've seen this before but its been years and I forgot how it was resolved.

[Gaieus]

Daniel,

There is a difference how materials are handled in v.5 and since v6 (and 7 of course). As far as I remember, in v5, materials were simple image files (but correct me if I am wrong) while since v.6, they are skm files (which is actually a zip file with the image file inside) so placing the material folder of v.5 into that of v.7 will probably not work.

If what I am saying is true, you will need to import those materials into v.7 now. This is of course a tedious job but TIG has a Mass Material Importer plugin (sorry for hotlinking to the plugin itself but for some reason, I cannot access the Ruby Library Depot - copy the ruby script text and paste it into a text editor and save it as massmaterialimporter.rb
http://www.crai.archi.fr/RubyLibraryDepot/Ruby/massmaterialimporter.rb

The only drawback of the plugin is that it certainly cannot "guess" what a material size (speaking of "real life", physical size like centimetres or inches) should be so you will still need to give the proper scale of the individual materials under the edit tab.

[tald311]

Hey Gaieus

Thanks for this. I will give this a try. And you are correct they are skm files.
Thanks again
Dan Tal