Materials with transparency automatically duplicate when being applied

Not sure. It seems to happen soon after creating a material, dropping transparency, and then editing it later. Ultimately it requires using the paint bucket eye dropper to select and paint that material onto a new group.

It seems to happen with materials created in sketchup. I have never even created a material outside of sketchup.

Are your materials stored on the Network?

Nope. Nothing like that. It’s just a bug on the Mac version we have.

You could easily replicate it by watching the video I uploaded on the original post, if it had not been deleted…

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Deploying on network has never been implemented very well.
There is no ‘network’ version of SketchUp, it is just the regular one…
With the new Subscriptions and currently the need to sign in for contents of Warehouses this should be addressed

Somehow, I cannot see the vid
Did you see the thread I linked to in the second post?

I said it was ONE of the issues, you may only be experiencing another or you may be unknowingly using bad materials…

over the past last 3 years I have successfully cleaned and optimised over 5000 misbehaving skm files for a number of forum members and a large external repository…

the two primary issues are corrupt data added by extensions and bloated size due to PS originals or screen grabs…

I was originally doing this manually, so it was in my interest to pin point common causes so I could automate the process…

many of the ‘corrupt’ files were in models where ‘no renderer’ was used in the creation…

the materials had come from other components and/or the users library…

my current optimiser save over 80 MB in a 126 MB Materials Folder…

I have have had similar results on single models…

john

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I can reproduce, clean install, no extensions.

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I believe something happened with this BB where a whole lot of old video and graphic uploads were lost. If you still have a copy, it would be a help to re-upload it.

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On the question of it going black and white, meaning grayscale, that does seem to be the case (but not on Windows), but, you can immediately use the color wheel to tint the material back to what it was, or to any other color you want it to be.

On this behavior it’s also inconsistent. Sometimes it lets me edit a color starting from where it began. But sometimes it immediately goes to black and white making it infuriating to edit colors with small adjustments using the color wheel. Would really appreciate an overhaul of this system that simply ignored the macOS internal picker and just override it with a proprietary one that perhaps was consistent across all platforms.

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Yes, grayscale, thanks colin.
The colour wheel can be used, but will completely screw the original tint, impossible for fine tuning.
Only ay I found is to reset colour, 1, 2 sometimes 3 times, then re-tweak the colour.
When double clicking the texture in the library, all its current colours, in all the tabs (colour wheel, sliders, etc…) are set to 100%, HSB, CMYK, RGB.

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Forgive me if someone already said this but if you temporarily change a transparent material to opaque, you can apply it elsewhere. Then change it back. Hacky work-around but it does the job.

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I’m having this problem. I thought I was losing my mind.
There does not seem to be any way to apply a transparent vray material either to a singular face, or group without SU automatically creating a ‘New’ material. Even when dragging the material out of the material editor into Entity Info it does not stick.

Creates a new material for each instance you drop. I currently have 15 versions of material for trying to apply “Glass Tinted Gray” vray material. Renders fine, but creating all the extra materials is irritating.

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Still waiting…

At least there are more people involved in this discussion. That is progress.

Let’s all keep sharing to at least try to find better workarounds until SketchUp feels like fixing their app to make it usable for PAYING PROFESSIONAL Mac users.

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I wonder how @Aristodimos deals with this? Usually, the designers on Mac I have met are not that organised. (I also have myself in mind, though)
The way I dealt with shortcomings of SketchUp (or other software, for that matter) was usually: Ok, that doesn’t work, move on and get the most out of the parts that did) However, now working for a Distributor of software I get a lot of questions regarding this issue and come to realise that we are not al the same. Trying to get the software better is my main goal in this. And better implementation of MacOs’s capabilities. Waiting is a non-productive activity I cannot afford…

I know the issue affect the developers, too. Most of them are not around on these user forums, or cannot respond, due to NDA or whatever. @Mark eting people are, though :grinning:

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Hey! I resemble that remark! Actually, I always felt like it was my fault I could never quite be on top of materials, but there was always some other issue that was even more important.

I wonder if Material Replacer is a good tool in the mean time to fix these materials?

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Yesterday, while working in a model and watching the materials library very carefully, I noticed that the “current material” shown in the teeny tiny Mac color picker seems to govern, and often toggles back to the default material while toggling between the paint and selection tools.

It seems to be that a duplicate material is created when you go to apply the material that you think is current - because it appears to be selected in the SketchUp library - but that material is not shown as the current material in the Mac color picker.

I have had success avoiding duplicate materials being created by verifying that the current material shown in the Mac color picker is in fact the material I want to apply.

More complicated still is the creation of new materials, or applying materials directly from a library other than the “Colors in Model” library. This is an absolute mess; it is impossible to clearly and easily create a custom material library, apply and edit those materials in your model.

It is crystal clear to me that the problem at the core is a thoroughly unresolved load of conflicts between the Mac color picker and the SketchUp material library. It seems that the two were simply thrown together without any further consideration, and it’s obvious that SketchUp continues to ignore the conflicts and as a result allows this very serious defect to render the software close to unusable for serious, PAYING, Mac professional users.

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Thanks for the bump, @MikeWayzovski. I was interested to read @LAURIE’s update and workaround below. We agree this is a funky bug: it’s definitely on our radar, and I hope to update the thread again before too long.

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