Purge Unused Materials

SketchUp
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1

Hello,
I am modelling a simple house and using probably 10 different materials.
I’m trying to purge the unused materials, however I still see over 70 materials in the Materials tab. When I right-click each material swatch, and select ‘Area’, many are showing 0sqm.

Questions:

  • If the material is covering 0sqm, why does it say the material is being used when I try to delete it?
  • Is there a way to identify where in my model the materials are being used?

Thanks!

colours purge
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3

Materials can be applied to used groups/instances/edges none of which will return an area.
Materials can also be applied to entities [like faces] in unused definitions, so best to purge everything in order, with component definitions first, with the layers/tags and materials being the last done…

4

Materials applied to groups and components do report an area that corresponds to the total area of both sides of faces inside that have the default material.
Here, I painted one face of a 1 m cube red, grouped, and painted the group blue. It reports 10 m² for the blue material

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5

But it is possible to apply a material to a group of edges [no faces], to an instance containing edges [no faces] OR simply onto ‘raw’ edges.
None of these will have an area either.

Some sensible regular purging and the removal of edge materials is probably the best approach to avoid this…

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6

Thanks for your tips guys.
May I ask, in order to follow these purge steps “purge everything in order, with component definitions first, with the layers/tags and materials being the last done”
How do I find the component definitions that are using the unused materials?

i.e. can you provide a bit of a step-by-step? Apologies, I’m still learning.
Thanks in advance.

7

You would need a Ruby extension for that.

Easiest is to use the “Purge” button on the Model Info>Statistics dialog repeatedly until the model has nothing unused left to purge.

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