How to import > 140 textures to create Indigo Materials

[mvandervoort]

Hi,

I'm fiddling around with Indigo, SkIndigo and SketchUp and I'm quite impressed. I've collected a quality set of SketchUp materials for many kinds of American and European wood species. In total more than 140. All based on modest resolution jpegs images which I own and converted to .skm files for 2 different wood grains.

I would be very happy to be able massivly importing these jpegs into the Indigo Material Editor based on a kind of "master material type" which has been given the appropriate material characteristics. In SkIndigo provided by a "Material Preset" for example.

Obviously a import script would come into mind. Searching through the Forums, Tutorials and Documentation didn't give me any glue of a tool available for this task. Any suggestions how to accomplish this task in an efficient way?

Thanks for any attention to this topic.

Manfred van der Voort
Hout'crea-tor -vormgever aan hout -

[Soup]

Hrm... interesting challenge.
Firstly let me note that any material you use in SketchUp is, by default, a diffuse. Simply using the texture material in SketchUp creates an Indigo material for it.
However to make things a little more interesting...
You could group types of textures into types of materials, ie: shiny, diffuse, transparent...
Then crate your 'master material' for each type. Then use some sort of batch file that would copy the base material, and then find/replace the texture file details into it.

The materials are stored as XML, so any word editor can read them.

Good luck!

[mvandervoort]

Hi Soup,

Thanks for your valuable response. Programming batch scripts is the challenging part for me of your suggested solution. I understand the method and will find someone in my network to make a script.

Another question related to this one. Wouldn't it be handy to have a collection mechanism in the Indigo materials databse in addition to individual ones? Just in mine example, it would be not very efficient to download every single wood piece when 140 have been available.

Related to this question: I'm observing the Web-site of materials and the progress of uploaded ones. I noticed an increasing number daily

There are 506 materials in 15 categories

, but the most recent one showed is the one I uploaded myself a couple of days ago. And in addition to this, counting the numbers presented at the categories will result in just 208. So i'm doubting about the correctnes of the published Total number. Is this a correct representation of what is says?