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I am trying to have SpaceDesign to calculate the area of different materials in SketchUp 2014 pro.

As an example, I have a cubic space that has 5 different materials on the outer side. Currently, the only way I know about to calculate these surface areas is by creating a dynamic component and giving it attributes (as an example:"=FACEAREA("MW51b") in this, MW51b is the material on one side)

With this method, I will have to re-add all the attributes to all new dynamic components. I do know that SpaceDesign has the ability to calculate areas with %a% or %a-m% in metric meters. But is there a way to have SpaceDesign calculate the area of the different materials without adding attributes to the dynamic components?

We need some help to calculate areas - because you usually to not want to sum of areas of all faces, but rather the area of some specific faces

There are two ways -  besides using a dynamic component attribute - to specify as for components in SpaceDesign:

Specifying Faces to use for areas

Use Layer Name

Place the face in a special layer:

• If you place a face in the layer _SD_AREA within a component or group, it will use that face (including scaling) to determine the area of the Component or Group

Identify face in existing component

To define and use areas for a component:

1. Add a new attribute, and use %a% in its calculation.
2. (Or %a-m% for square meters, %a-cm% for square centimeters or %a-f% for square feet.)
3. After placing your component in a model, right click on it and select Define Area
4. Select a face in the component to be used as the area.

Note: This feature will only work if a single face in the component can be used to calculate the area.

Try these out and see if they will help.