How to get the material of component?

[DanRathbun]

@tickle

However, as far as I can tell, materials can only be assigned to DrawingElements, and components nor groups, nor any entity collection is a DrawingElement.

The SketchUp engine is C++ which is object-oriented. So goes the SketchUp DOM (Document Object Model) and the Ruby API.

Everything saved into DOM is a subclass of Entity. (ie, Layer, ShadowInfo, Material, etc.) The DrawingElement class is a subclass of Entity, and like it’s siblings inherits functions (aka methods,) constants, etc., from it’s superclass(es), all the way back to Object.) Anything that you can see or draw into the model, is an instance of a class, that is a subclass of DrawingElement. (The Face class for example, is a subclass of DrawingElement.)

But the new reading & writing API is C. You don’t clearly see in it, the object-orient inheritance of the SKP document’s DOM. So they mimic it with functions named similarly to how they’d be named in the OO languages. In Ruby you’d have Sketchup::Face.material(), but in C, they concatenate the whole object qualification together in one long name like: SketchUpFaceGetMaterial(). (Just an example, not an exact function name, per se.)

@tickle

Instead of having to loop through hundreds of faces and assign materials to them (which is slow), I would prefer assigning materials once, say, per component (definition is fine).

No it’s not. Assign persisting materials to the component instance(s), not their definition.

… and leave all the primitives in the definition’s entities collection with no material assignment, and they’ll render with each instance’s material assignment.

@tickle

EDIT: Just found out a ComponentDefinition is a DrawingElement. The Documentation on DrawingElement did not mention this, sorry. So I think I’m out of the woods.

EDIT 2: assigning the material to the ComponentDefinition didn’t work. I had to add it to the instance:

The assignment of a material to a component definition, will only render whilst a new component instance is being placed (ie, when it is attached to the cursor.)

It is sort of a highlighting effect. (“Here I am, insert me someplace good!”)