Sketchup Assigning Materials

[Pamela Galli]

Since I do a lot of home building I thought Sketchup might be an easy way to make building components -- I followed the instructions for exporting a model and importing into Blender and then inworld, and the model came out fine. However, I did not assign materials in Sketchup and now I can't seem to assign them in Blender 2.5. I can only assign one material at a time, even though I have "Data" selected rather than "Object".

 

Is it not possible to assign materials in Blender if I have not assigned them in Sketchup?

[Nacy Nightfire]

That was an interesting puzzle.  The solution seems to be that you need to unlink the default material.  Open up the mesh in the outliner view  and click on the arrow  to reveal the material assigned to the mesh then right click and unlink it.  You should be good to go for assigning multiple materials to  your mesh after that.

[Pamela Galli]

Thanks Nacy, but that didn't seem to have an effect. I am probably missing something but I am doing exactly what the tutorial said.

Meanwhile I read a tutorial about importing Sketchup models to Blender (did not mention materials, tho) and it said to convert triangles to quads (which had no discernable effect either) and then went into this explanation of how edges had to be split and vertices rearraged, etc., which made my eyes glaze over.

Seems more trouble than it's worth. I guess I am doomed to learning how to do this stuff entirely in Blender.

 

[Nacy Nightfire]

I tried again with a second model and had no trouble.  Perhaps you are forgetting to hit "assign" after making a new material for each selected set of faces. 

What I did have problems with is crashing.  I downloaded Sketchup 8 (free version) and couldn't seem import the exported .dae  file into the most current versions of Blender.  I finally got it into a very early 2.5x version I had on hand. 

The sketchup export did seem to be fairly stable in Blender 2.49.

I don't know what the advantage is to converting triangles to quads, unless you are going to further model and subdivide your mesh in blender.  In that case you'd probably benefit from retopologizing by hand because any automatic quad conversion might not be optimum for you purposes.  

P.S.  Blender won't seem like such a punishment once you get the hang of it.  It's really a terrific program.

[Pamela Galli]

Thanks for the feedback -- when I pick or make a new material, the whole thing rather than the selected faces turns the color of the material, even tho I have "data" selected.  I don't know what I am doing wrong -- maybe the version of Sketchup or Blender.

I do like Blender, and the 2.5 version really is much easier. I will keep plugging away :-)

[Nacy Nightfire]

I've been testing this with Sketchup 8 (free version).  I used the collada export and got the same initial results you did where the default material was persistent.

Here's yet another approach to try:

In the properties/material section right click on the default material-0 and select "Reset to Default Value"

 

the rest you know, but perhaps in your frustration with all this you are skipping a step:

 

- In edit mode, select the faces you want to apply a unique material to.

- In the materials panel, press the plus sign on the right to get a new material in the stack

- Press the plus sign at the bottom (new)

- Select a  unique color in the diffuse slot

- Hit "Assign" to assign this new material to your selected faces.

I hope this works!

[Nacy Nightfire]