Trying to skatter a pile of marbles with 4 different colors

I’m rendering with Vray 4.2 in sketchup. I’m pretty new to it but I’ve tried everything I can think of.

I import the marbles as components then I delete the default material and apply a vray matterial. Then I select the host object, and then the two different components with 2 different materials and then one material renders but the other is just white. Sometimes the red will show up instead of the green but never the 2 colors together. Desperate for help, haha. Thanks to anyone who can lend me some advice!

Could it be a name clash between the materials?

Are the materials applied to the component instances, or to the entities inside the component? (it should be the latter for the materials to be preserved in Skatter instances.

Could you send the file to [email protected] ?

Omg, that was it. You’re amazing. Ugh that was a headache. So much trial and error, haha. Hope you have a lovely day. Cheers!!!

Ok so I should probably explain what’s going on:

SketchUp components have definitions and instances.

A component definition is like a template. It is where the content of the component lives, all its geometry, the nested groups/components, etc. It also has some attributes like “glue-to”, “always face camera”, etc (what you see in the “Edit” tab in the Components window). Definitions are listed in the Components window. A definition does not exist in the viewport.

A component instance is a physical copy of the definition. When you see a component in the viewport, it is an instance. There can be many instances of a single definition.
Instances have their own attributes, like whether they are hidden, locked, assigned tag/layer, etc. And we can apply a material to an instance.

But several instances of the same definition can have different materials.
When you pick a component instance as a Scattered Object in Skatter, it actually saves a reference to the definition of the instance so that the reference is not lost if you delete the instance. But since the definition has no material, the information about the material applied to the instance is lost in the process.
This is what you were experiencing.

In Skatter v2, the reference to the picked instance will be saved (as well as the definition), so it will try to preserve the material assigned to the picked instance if it still exists.

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