Dear All,

I am a electronics engineer and I often use Matlab software. It is
basically a software that enables you make computations with matrices.
What I need is to export my 3D model into such a file that I can
convert it into a Matlab 3D matrix to perform further analysis.

To make things more clear I want to give an example. Say that you have
an optical fiber in cylindrical shape which has is composed of a core
region and a cladding. That is think of a thick pipe (the cladding)
which is is filled by a cylinder of different material (the core).
First I want to mesh the 3D model I draw in SketchUp in to small
equivalent cubes. What I want from SketchUp is to give me an output
file saying:

The cube (0,0,0) is made of material_1 (or belongs to cladding)
The cube (0,0,1) is made of material_1
...
The cube (j,k,l) is made of material_n (or belongs to core)
...

in some format.

I would prefer this kind of format: For the fiber we should get:

assuming material2 is air, material0 is cladding, material1 is the
core:

for z=0 plane:

222222222222222222222
222222000000000222222
222200000000000002222
222000001111100000222
220000011111110000022
220000011111110000022
222000001111100000222
222200000000000002222
222222000000000222222
222222222222222222222

for z=1 plane:

222222222222222222222
222222000000000222222
222200000000000002222
222000001111100000222
220000011111110000022
220000011111110000022
222000001111100000222
222200000000000002222
222222000000000222222
222222222222222222222

....

and so on.

I think these kinds of files are called voxel files.

Is there any such available script to convert a model to this format.?
If not is there any one willing to write such a script? There are some
available software for simulating such things but they really lack a
3D modeling interface. So if such a thing is available I am sure many
engineers will use this to load a 3D model with Matlab or other
simulation software.

I found a Python script for Blender doing the thing I want in:
http://gamulabs.freepgs.com/blends/scripts/b2mat/b2mat_01a.zip

This script outputs a text file,
it has only two lines and the data is in the second line. First line
tells the dimension. An example is "120x20x60". And the second line
consists -1's and zeros separated by comma. Therefore there are a
total of 1202060=144000 1's or 0's. You just have to reshape this
data into a 120x20x60 matrix. I don't know whether the exact same
thing is applicable in SketchUp.

Regards