I work for a firm that does design and working drawings for small and large residential projects. We use Sketchup for preliminary design, visualization and some early cost analysis and use revit for working drawings. Sketchup allows us to model and revise very quickly. There are some tools available in sketchup (area etc.)that can give us information to check against current building costs in our area. The attribute tools in Su7 are allowing us to include more intelligence in our models to make feasibility studies easier. Automating this process with your proposed tools would be useful in our work flow if they can be implemented without weighing down the sketchup files and slowing the performance of the program. Creating 2d detailing of a large project for on site use by contractors would be nearly impossible in Sketchup. A combination of Sketchup and Layout could possibly be used for this on small projects. Concept, presentation and early design development are sketchup's current strong points and BIM software's weak points. This seems like a reasonable division of labour.

If we run into issues with complex shapes in revit we use sketchup to make mass models and import them into revit. Complex roof design seems to be a recurring use for Sketchup in Revit. Interaction with sketchup is a little crudely but still effectively built-in to Revit already.

We use Revit for structural, MEP and architectural working drawings. The accuracy of and speed with which we create the drawings has improved drastically since moving from Autocad to Revit. Every object in a Revit model is packed with information and has the option of having custom attributes added. The level of information stored in a Revit file allows great flexibility and fine grained information presentation. Getting enough information into a sketchup model to do this seems improbable.

Richard,
I'm with you on your wish list item, either as a part of sketchup or as part of a script that could intercept a model being inserted and execute an action like TIG's script above.

Thanks TIG,
This helped a lot. I still have some issues though and I've sent a PM with a couple of questions.

I am trying to simplify a very crowded colour palette so I can export and render more easily. There are 150 materials in the file, over 400 component definitions and 250 odd groups, it's a big project. Many of the components are from other projects and have different colours basically for the same thing: window componets with 6 different coulours of glass every tree component has a 2 different colours of green etc. I would like to be able to select a material in an object or on the palette and be able to replace that material in all objects to which it is applied in the project: grouped objects objects in components, everywhere it occurs. Many of the materials I can't even find when I look through the geometry.

I a trying to replace the textures with a texture that already exists in the model for example :
There are window components in the model that use blue glass and some that use gray glass. I'd like to change them all to one colour - gray glass.

Is there a way to replace all instances of a texture in a model including where applied to objects in groups and components without opening each individual object? I have looked through the ruby repositories and can't find a solution.