Materials

A material in Cabybara is the visual finish and nothing more - color and texture on screen. Manufacturing identity (dimensions, cost, grain, sheet sizes) lives on the stock. The two are deliberately separate: restyle without touching costs or nesting, reprice without changing looks.

One design rule makes the whole system predictable: painting sets the component's SketchUp material, exactly like the native paint bucket - no hidden plugin data. So Cabybara's painter, SketchUp's own paint tools, the Components Manager, labels and reports all read and write the same thing and can never disagree.

Three sources

• My Library - your own .skm files in the plugin's materials folder (set in Settings, Materials tab). These are what the Material dropdowns in the cabinet dialog, panel dialog and stock catalog offer, and they travel with the folder, not with any model.
• In Model - materials present in the current model.
• SketchUp Libraries - the collections installed with SketchUp, plus materials you saved into SketchUp's own materials folder from its native tray; browsable and importable into your library.

How a panel gets its look

Precedence, applied everywhere: an explicit Material choice wins; otherwise the assigned stock's catalog material is used; otherwise the plain SketchUp default look. Choosing None in a dialog's Material dropdown therefore means "use the stock's material".

Two consequences worth knowing:

• The painter's remove mode resets a panel to the SketchUp default look, not to the stock's material. To get the stock look back, re-assign the stock with the Stock Painter (it re-applies the stock's material while its "Apply stock material on paint" option is on).
• A component's material shows only on faces that still carry the default material. Faces that were painted directly (e.g. with the native bucket inside the component) mask it - the Materials Painter's Ctrl+Click resets those faces.

Hand-painted looks live on the placed cabinet: a cabinet created again from the dialog gets its materials from the dialog and stock values (there is no in-place regenerate for cabinets).

Category defaults

Five categories - frame, door, fiber, shelves, drawer frame - can each have a default material (Settings, Defaults tab, chosen from your library). They pre-select the Material dropdowns for new cabinets, and the Materials Manager marks them with green "default:" chips.

Where materials appear

The cabinet and panel dialogs (Material column of the assignment matrix), the stock catalog (each stock's Visual material), the production report's Material column, part labels (the material field), nesting part tooltips, and the Components Manager (view and bulk-apply).

Pages

• Materials Manager - browse all three sources, create materials, import into the library, purge.
• Materials Painter - hover-paint materials onto panels, with its picker window.