<>in material names

[Al Hart]

Does anyone remember why some material names contain <> around them?

I have an older model with the material: <Wood-floor-light> and a newer model with the material: Wood_Floor_Light. Both came from SketchUp material libraries.

[Anssi]

I think that the carets happen when you import something that has a material with a name already in use in the model. As to the hyphens, I guess that they were replaced with the underscores in some release, possibly v.4 when Ruby scripting was introduced. Perhaps they thought that anything a program can interpret as a mathematical symbol is to be avoided in naming conventions.

Anssi

[Gaieus]

I didn't use v.4 yet still I also have the same with some material names.
I would believe now that models I started in v.5 and went on modelling in v.6 has this and I suspect that this is because of the different texture library handling of SU6 now (it does not recognise the old textures no matter they are the same images).

Certainly I'm not sure about this - it's just my suspicion. Try to open a model wich you created in v.5 to see maybe.

[jhauswirth]

Just a guess, but I have seen <> wrapping words that need localized. SU looks for <> to tell it if it needs localized. If you go from SU 6 that has <> in its names and then go to SU 5, SU 5 may not know how to localize it.

[Al Hart]

Thanks for the ideas.

1. Pasting components with mateirals

I just tested pasting a component which had materials with the same name as materials already in my model. It renamed the old materials using square braces.

0001_PaleVioletRed - was in my model already
[0001_PaleVioletRed]1 - was the renamed, pasted material

• So it looks like were going to have to modify the code which checks for carets to check for square braces as well.

2. SU 5 models

I downloaded the original model from the 3D Warehouse.

• When I load it in SU 5 - it has no carets on material names
• When I load it into SU 6 - all material names have carets.

I tried a new SU 5 model, and the same thing happens when you load it into SU 6.

Again, thanks for your ideas on this - it put me on the right track.