I have a custom materials folder in which I keep my own wood materials. My problem is I have both solid lumber and sheet goods files in my custom folder but in Sketchup only the wood species name is showing up. For example, I have two material files one called Red Oak.skm and the other is called Red Oak Plywood.skm. Both are using the same texture image. But in Sketchup there are two materials called Red Oak and I can’t tell which one is is the solid wood and which one is the plywood. They both just say Red Oak even though one of the file names is Red Oak Plywood. Why does Sketchup not use the name of the skm file when listing in the materials tray? And besides all this there are some files that don’t show up at all in Sketchup.
It would be interesting to look at your materials. Can you zip up the folder and share it?
If I were you I would use separate image files for the red oak and red oak plywood textures. They can look the same but if you start with two separate image files, I think you won’t have the problem.
So interestingly, when you have duplicates with the same image, they get treated as the same material when used in the model. For example the two alder textures get reduced to one in the model because except for the .skm name they are otherwise identical. To be honest, I’m not sure what the benefit is of having identical materials but with different names. I guess I can’t say it would occur to me to do that… As I said, you could take the images, edit them a little, and save them as new images. Then create new textures for the plywoods, let’s say.
I would be inclined to create separate folders for the plywood textures and the solid wood textures. I actually create folders for solid woods by species but you don’t appear to have that many so that might be overkill.
You might want to check them for size, too. Some of them look kind of large for the species they represent.
Do you have an image editor set up as a default for SketchUp?
I use the solid wood and plywood files for the OpenCutList extension which requires separate material specifications. I can use different image files if that’s all it is. Thanks Dave.
Ah… I see. That’s too bad.
Separate image files will work. They don’t have to be much different.
The SketchUp Material file format (.skm) is a zipped Xml file that holds the image and some Xml files.
Renaming the image file inside is not enough, one needs to edit the Xml files as well.
If you duplicate the image file, rename it and import that into SketchUp, it will create it for you