I have a TON of time invested in this particular DC. There are over 30 child components and everything works beautifully, overall very happy with the results.
I’ve put off to the end to start messing with materials, but ultimately the end user will be able to select the carcase material and also the front material. So, I’ve already created a custom materials library with all our various materials. I added it to my favorites in the file.
At first I tried building a custom attribute “CarcaseColor” with a list of options. I set the value to match the name of the color in the library, but Sketchup kept saying that it wasn’t in the model. Then I figured I needed to drag my materials into the In Model section, which is a hassle because there are hundreds and will be time consuming. After I did that, I started getting Sketchup’s version of the blue screen of death, “No entity data returned.” and then the longer message after that about length not being found.
I’ve disabled and re-enabled DC in the extensions manager, after restarting Sketchup. I’ve also done the same after restarting the computer. No luck.
There are no folders or file names that start with “u”, so it’s not that either.
Then I thought perhaps it was the custom materials or something that got messed up when I dragged my custom materials into In Model. So I figured I’d outsmart it. I started a new file, imported the DC, figured out the RGB for my custom colors and went the route of creating a new material and then inputting the RGB. I still get the same error issue, so it’s clearly tied to the addition of the Material attribute in the child component, but I cannot figure out how to fix it or work around it. It’s pretty important to be able to add colors easily as part of this catalog build out, so any help would be appreciated.
I have 6 or 8 child components that will all have the same formula as they all make up the carcase of the cabinet, but the error occurs the moment I add the Materials attribute to the first component.
I was getting this error when I had material names with quotation marks in them, i.e. imperial inches, for example 3/4" Maple Plywood. If you are using non alphanumerics in your material names, try removing them and see if it fixes it.
Your Favorites is only on your machine, we wouldn’t see those colors in your model.
It does look like when you add a material it needs to be in the model already. That may relate to a change in SketchUp 2024, if you still have 2023 you could work the old way.
I noticed that if I add the material to the model after seeing the error message, it doesn’t recover. The material is now there, but it isn’t found. I will log a bug report about that.
If you need to work in 2024 for other reasons, it might be quickest to draw a grid and paint each part with one of your custom materials. Then they all will be in the model, and adding the attributes should work.
I didn’t have any of that luckily, the benefits of working in Metric! I thought perhaps it was an issue with the fact that they all started with numbers, but I don’t think that’s it because it also happened when I made new materials in the model using the RGB.
I’m working in 2023 currently, only because I tend to have more crash issues when I use 2024 vs 2023. It also works much slower in the newer version.
I’ll try your method and see what happens. So really I need to put the materials in a grid in the first portion before I attempt the attribute in order to hopefully bypass the error message.
Thanks for the tips, fingers crossed this solves it!
It doesn’t literally have to be a grid, so long as the material has been used in the model. For example, you could repaint the same rectangle in each of the materials, and by the end all of them would be in the In Model set of materials.