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Material Maintenance 2.1

posted Nov 11, 2012 1:12 PM by My Hand [ updat ed Dec 2, 2012 6: 17 AM ]

Code and performance updat e from version 2.0 wit h t homt hom's suggest ed changes. Funct ionally t he same as 2.0. Also not e inst allat ion is now as a .rbz plugin. See inst ruct ion at t he bot t om. Version 2.1.1 fixes issues when run on a MAC. Over the last few days I started cleaning up a particularly large model and found that is was not easy to figure out which entities materials have been applied. I need to know this so that I can determine the best material to replace it with. So here comes version 2.1 of the Material Maintenance plugin. It has the following new features: Shows material thumbnails to help identify materials You can now choose if you want to change materials in: The current selection The whole model (does not include component definitions) Component definitions. Is much faster, especially for replacing a number of materials - I now parse the model once, so remember to press the Re-Load button after you have made changes in the model or scope selection. You can now identify where materials have been used in the model by selecting one of the following mechanisms: Construction Lines - Will draw construction lines on the entities that has selected materials applied. Layers - Will highlight the faces and component instances with selected materials in the model while changing all other surfaces to near transparent Selecting all entities with the selected materials applied. Allows you to list components that contain the selected materials in their definitions. Here is a screen shot of the new UI.

Note the two new sections at the top for selecting the scope within which to execute operations and to identify selected materials.

Finding materials in model

Once you have loaded the relevant materials into the top materials list, you can see where these have been used in the model using the three options in the Show In Model group box.

Construction Lines
The following two images show how this might look in a model. Construction lines are changed to red while this option is selected.

Note you can play around with wire-frame, x-ray, edge settings etc. to help highlight the entities best. Every face will get a construction line (lenth 40 units) through its geometric centre and a construction point at the centre. Component Instances and Groups will get three infinite construction lines along the three axes.

Layer Highlighting
See the below two images for an example of how this looks in a large model.

The two bright yellow objects in the far end of the model use the specified material (It looks much clearer on a full size image).

Unfortunately you need to apply some manual configuration to use this feature to its best. This feature works by changing the layer of the the entities containing the selected material to a new layer, called __FINDER__, and then changing the model to colour by layer. The trick is to change the transparency of all the layer colours, except for t he __FINDER__ lay er which should be a BRIGHT solid colour. It does all this automatically (and will restore the entities to the correct layers once the check box is un-checked again). Due to limitations in the Sketchup API, it is not possible to change the layer colours automatically. Luckily you only have to change it once (and update if you add new layers). You also have to have the render settings set to a scheme that will render by layer colour (Shaded or Shaded with Textures). I also prefer to hide edges and also enable x-ray, for best results.

Find Components
As materials can also be used in components that might or might not have instances in the model, it is useful to determine which components use a selected material.

determine which components use a selected material. This is where the List Components Containing Selected Materials button comes in handy. It will list all components that contains the selected materials. See the below example image.

Traductor de Google

Instalation
If you have installed the previous version, delete that first. That should be the:

Material_Maintenance.rb file in the Plugins folder Material_Maintenance sub folder in the Plugins folder Then download the Material_Maintenance.rbz file and install using the following inst ruct ions . As before please do not dist ribut e t he plugin file independent ly , but y ou are welcome t o share a link t o t his page. Also would love t o know if t his works for y ou so please do post a comment below.

 Material_Maintenance_v2.1.1.rbz (510k)
My Hand, Dec 2, 2012 6:16 AM v.1

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