Is it possible to locate where a material is used in a model?

SketchUp Pro
1

For example - if you’ve got dozens of materials in the model - perhaps some are quite large. It would be nice to select the material - and have the organizer or something zero-in on that group or geometry that contains the material so you can decide to keep or replace it. Otherwise there’s no way to find it - especially if its a tiny object buried deep in a building.

Thanks

2

Nope. You’d think such an insanely basic thing would be implemented right? And the other way around is worse. If you want to find a material from your model in a palette, it’s almost impossible too.

4 Likes
3

This is one example of several in SketchUp where things have a one way relationship. In this case, an entity may point to a material, but the material has no record of what is using it. Tags are the same way.

Usually this happened because the linked property is needed to present the entity for rendering, hence a pointer from the entity to the property is needed. But there is no operational need to go the other way so the devs chose not to implement support for it, reducing memory overhead and potential consistency issues. They didn’t allow for what you seek to do.

2 Likes
4

You could temporarily edit the color of the material to make it evident where it is used.
mats

3 Likes
5

Hello,
If you have vray it is possible to deep select any texture that is currently selected.

If you dont have it, and if I undersrand well you are worried about large textures that may only be used on a tiny element, well this extension may be helpful to you :
https://extensions.sketchup.com/extension/77b60f26-2352-407e-8c0c-9862c9716111/material-resizer

2 Likes
6

I just remembered a similar question some Time ago and I uploaded a plugin that kind of does it. Careful though, as I precised it Can lead to errors, save before using !

1 Like
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haha - yep - great idea - lime green it is!

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I ran into an issue where my model was too large so in an effort to reduce the size I started purging materials, which is when I cam across about 600 individual materials (also similar but different shapes and sizes) and I could not for the life of me figure out where these materials were located in my model.(I mainly design/decorate houses so I group each individual room to keep things more organized)
This was my solution, maybe it will help someone in the future:

  1. save .skp file as a copy
  2. open the model info and go to statistics.
  3. delete each group one at a time and purge after each deletion until the hidden material dissapears from the material tray.
  4. Once you know what group the material is in you can go back to your original model. Ctrl+C to copy that individual group (I hid everything else in the model except that group)
  5. explode the entire group until there are no groups within the group.
  6. draw a rectangle and paste the hidden material (from the material tray)
  7. right click on the material on the rectangle and select ‘select all with same material’ then select ‘bounding edges’ then select ‘invert selection’ and then delete the selected faces. You should be left with just the rectangle you made and any of the hidden material.
  8. for added measure (if you don’t see the hidden material) I click ‘select all’ then group it. the bounding edges of the group help determine where the missing face is. Once you find the missing face, you can delete everything thats left and then ‘paste in place’ the original group. Go to where the hidden material was and change it or delete it.

This is very tidious obviously but if your desperate to find a material then it does work.
Hope that helps.