Material settings no longer saved inside SKM ?

[derei]

Hello,

If the memory doesn't play a trick on me, I believe that in some of the previous versions of SU, the material data was saved insite skm material (inside the xml file) and from there was parsed externally by twilight, because from what I remember, SU wasn't reading all data from the file.

Anyway, my question is if this is no longer applicable? I tried to use a SketchUp material that had TL template added to it and was later on saved in a library, but the template settings weren't loaded... I was thinking how could I have automatic material assignment, so I won't have all the time to manually assign or create the materials. What I mean is after modelling, just to attach a SU material from my custom made library and from then to be ready for rendering.

Also, beside this... is it any way to save a TL material in a custom library, from TL? I know that KT libraries are compatible, but that would to build the materials and save them using KT, only to be used in TL.

Thank you very much.

[Chris]

That is partly correct. It doesn't actually involve Twilight Render, it is all dependent on SketchUp. Twilight Render saves settings in the SketchUp material, in attribute dictionaries. If I recall correctly, SketchUp will load material attributes from an SKM but it will not save them to an SKM. (It's possible I have that backward, that it will save but not load.) So it never worked to be able to save TWR settings in an SKM unfortunately.

There is a secondary issue with TWR V2. We switched over from saving separate individual attributes to using a binary stream (kind of like a binary file) stored in the material. Last time I looked into it, SketchUp does not load or save this stream data from SKM. Since SketchUp doesn't save the data, we decided it was a moot point in any case.

Right now, the ability to export and import from a KT library is the only way to save materials. You could save a SU scene with your materials in it and then merge it with an existing scene but that does have limited flexibility.

[derei]

So, there is also no way to directly link TL materials to SU materials?
Let's say that eventually I build a materials library that I have exported with KT for further usage... and I also have their correspondents as SU materials... Now, is it any way to directly link those, so after I applied the SU material, the TL material will be automatically selected?
Because yes, TL is great in making materials on the spot, but when you get tired of making the same materials all over again, especially if you need some deep editor tweaks, it becomes annoying.

Maybe it would worth digging into this somehow... having a way to save a material directly from TL (as individual material, not collection) and at the same time, to be able to cross-reference it with a SU material that has the exact name. This may require for the user to declare in TWL options where the materials folders are, but that wouldn't be a problem. In this way, it would be possible to automatically tel TWL where to load the materials from, for the current model.