what happens if you add this folder to Materials on a windows PC…
color-samples.zip (15.6 KB)
do you get a parent folder ‘John’ or not?
john
The “stock” library is always enumerated (usually first because SketchUp expects it.)
On Windows it’s in the %ProgramData% path since uh … v2014 I think (when Ruby 2 gave us unicode support.)
That’s a zip archive. If I open it, it has a “John” folder, if I drag that folder out of 7Zip into my user “Materials” and start SketchUp … bring my RESOURCES tabbed tray to the top, click on the Materials pull down menu, and scroll the mouse wheel a bit, and there it is in the custom set below the “stock” set …
Now, I can understand how users would want to control the layout of this pull down menu.
It is a pain to use. Every time I do I forget that it doesn’t work the same as the Components panel and expect it to. But it doesn’t.
The Components panel list window is a bit more like navigating the folders, where as the Materials forces the use of this pulldown menu (which also has different styling then the Components pulldown.)
I can see why some users would want to have their own resources listed first. And I am not against any user being able to tell the application how they want to use it.
A “collapse to SketchUp” command might be nice, where the “stock” material folders are nested below a “SketchUp” folder.
However, as a programmer, I know that deleting Program Data folders is risky. Creating a “SketchUp” or “Stock” folder and dragging all the other folders into it, would be far less risky.
But SketchUp has distributed resources that it checks to see if they are present when it starts, and if not, it will attempt to copy them back (from it’s archive in %ProgramFiles%) into %ProgramData% again.
cheers dan,
the reason I ask is you can’t have sub-folders in mac materials folder so it makes it hard to have a single set for cross platform use…
on a mac John\subfolder# is just appending the name and you get an entry for each but when shared it should be the parent folder and child…
which seems to have happened, but I should have zipped 2, to see if unzipping merges them…
Archive.zip (16.2 KB)
john
When I click on John in the pull down menu, I enter the "John" folder …
… and we see the "color-samples" folder (although it’s just text and we can’t really tell whether it’s a folder or a material proper. I guess using all upcase for folders might help?)
Clicking "color-samples" we see it’s listing …
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I expected the “stock” materials to continue to be loaded, I guess what surprised me is that the preferences pane starts out with the file directory as being “pointed” at the standard application support location for user material files, but if you change that to direct it toward a custom folder I would have expected Sketchup to replace the location with the new one. But instead as @MikeWayzovski points out Sketchup continues to check the application support user folder even though it’s been redirected, as well as checking the new location. So 3 places get checked. It’s fine, even useful once understood, I can have common custom materials in the application support folder and continue to change the preferences to load other custom folders while keeping accesses to all. It was just surprising.
Man, I’m jealous looking at your PC materials pane, I wish we had a text list view.
It easier to see what are folders when set to some size thumbnails …
And I just again tried changing the Materials path in Preferences to "D:/Documents/SketchUp/Materials", restarted SketchUp 2018 and it failed to enumerate the folder on D drive.
I have to manually “Add a local collection…” to add any other special folder paths to the drop down list in the Materials inspector.
The nice thing about the side bar is it appears in Open… and Save… dialog boxes (mostly) from within a program, not just while in the Finder.