Applying new Material to a Selection is extremely slow

[fuzzybro]

Hi all,

Could you please suggest how to apply a newly created material to a whole bunch of faces in the selection?

Right now I'm doing it by looping through all the faces/instances in the selection and assigning new material:

  materials = Sketchup.active_model.materials
  mat = materials.add "My New Material"

  entities = Sketchup.active_model.selection
  entities.each do |e|
    is_instance = is_instance?(e)
    is_face = e.is_a?(Sketchup;;Face)
    next if !is_instance && !is_face
    e.material = mat
    e.back_material = mat if e.is_a?(Sketchup;;Face)
  end

But it turns out to be extremely slow and doing the same thing via Paint Bucket Tool is blazing fast in comparison with assigning material via API.

Is there a fast way of doing it via API?

Cheers,
Bro

[tt_su]

It'd be good if you had a test model and some metrics to your existing code.

[dkendig]

materials = Sketchup.active_model.materials
mat = materials.add "My New Material"

#component instances
Sketchup.active_model.selection.grep(Sketchup::ComponentInstance){|inst| inst.material = mat}
#groups
Sketchup.active_model.selection.grep(Sketchup::Group){|grp| grp.material = mat}
#faces
Sketchup.active_model.selection.grep(Sketchup::Face){|f| f.material = mat;f.back_material = mat}

[pgarmyn]

@fuzzybro
Put your code within

Sketchup.active_model.start_operation("actionName", true,false,false)
..... Your code.....
Sketchup.active_model.commit_operation

This wil enable 'undo' for 'actionName' and the second parameter (false) wil disable screenupdate after each change of the model, until 'commit_operation'. API documentation says This can result in much faster Ruby code execution if the operation involves updating the model in any way.

[fuzzybro]

Hi all,

Totally forgot about the "start_operation" thing.
It worked out like a charm.

Thanks!

Bro

[dkendig]

good catch