Sketchup wood textures

[Ross K]

I'm a newbie on here so sorry if this has been covered before.

I'm a funriture maker and have recently discovered Sketchup whch I find a great tool for design and especially presenting ideas to customers.

However I find the standard package of wood textures included in the software a bit thin on the gound. Are there others available for download or adding in to the software (not sure of the geek terms for such things!)?

THanks for any advice.

 

[motownmartin]

Hi Ross, and welcome,

If you got to the Help tab at the top and click on Help centre, in there click on downloads at the left of the page the click on bonus packs, Bob's yer uncle

 

[motownmartin]

its a little different with sketchup 7, I might have sent you in the wrong direction but you should find your way in the help centre.

 

[SketchUp Guru]

You can also easily make your own either from images you've made or found images. There are a couple of things to be aware of however.

First, you don't want huge images for this. The file size of applied texture images is added to the file size of your model. Remember, too, that if you 'try on' materials in your model and don't actually use them, you should purge the unused ones. Otherwise they add to the file size.

The other thing to consider is that in many cases highly figured grains don't work very well. The image is obviously finite in size so at some point it is likely that the image will be repeated. It's easy to end up with surfaces that look like they've been tiled with the same piece of veneer. In my opinion, this looks worse than just using various browns and tans to represent wood.

 

[RobertMP]

I've just used pictures of wood grain that I've found on the web and saved the picture to my hard drive. There is a custom texture thing in the materials window where you can browse for a picture to use.

There may be a way to control the direction but if there is I haven't worked it out - so I save a second copy of the picture but rotated 90 deg. For example I have a whiteoakV and a whiteoakH (for vertical and horizontal) and just use whichever one produces the grain in the right direction on the part.

Now Dave can tell me the right way to do it

 

[SketchUp Guru]

Robert, I used to do the same thing, saving horizontal and vertical versions. I don't anymore, though. After you apply the material to the component you can select a single face, right click and choose Texture> Rotate. Right click again and choose 90°. After doing that for one face, I triple click on it to select all of them. Then I grab the eyedropper, sample the face I just modified and then click again to paint the rest of the faces. If there are other componets that need to have the grain running the same way, you can sample one that already has the orientation corrected.

This does require that you paint the faces in the component and not the component wrapper. Applying materials is also easier if you keep component axes alighned properly.

 

[motownmartin]

Thanks, this is very helpful info, do you know of any free software that will will enable me to rotate images at 30 degrees because the only software I have turns them 90 degrees only

 

[SketchUp Guru]

You can rotate them to any angle you choose right in SketchUp.

That brings up a point I wanted to make earlier but forgot to write. Suppose you were drawing something like the rafters for the roof of a shed. Suppose you draw the first one in place and then make it a component (for copying along the roof). Now suppose you apply a wood grain material to it. Very likely you'll find the wood grain runs either vertically or horizontally rather than along the length of the rafter. This is due to the component's axis alignment. If you select the component you'll see its bounding box is quite a bit larger than the rafter. The fix is to correct the axis alignment to that one axis runs along the long edge of the component. This is easy to do. Just right click on the component and choose Change Axes. Then click for the origin, click along the edge you wish to align with the red axis and then along the green. Pay attention to the direction of the blue axis but its direction is set by the other two.

 

[motownmartin]

You can rotate them to any angle you choose right in SketchUp.

That brings up a point I wanted to make earlier but forgot to write. Suppose you were drawing something like the rafters for the roof of a shed. Suppose you draw the first one in place and then make it a component (for copying along the roof). Now suppose you apply a wood grain material to it. Very likely you'll find the wood grain runs either vertically or horizontally rather than along the length of the rafter. This is due to the component's axis alignment. If you select the component you'll see its bounding box is quite a bit larger than the rafter. The fix is to correct the axis alignment to that one axis runs along the long edge of the component. This is easy to do. Just right click on the component and choose Change Axes. Then click for the origin, click along the edge you wish to align with the red axis and then along the green. Pay attention to the direction of the blue axis but its direction is set by the other two.

Ok, thats great but I have already drawn some items and not done any components but now I want to put some wood grain in the right direction, so i'm thinkinking of making some materials at different angles.

I know, what an awkward *** I am

 

[SketchUp Guru]

You can still rotate the textures on the faces. Just right click on the face to which you've applied the texture, choose Texture>Rotate. Then drag the green handle around to rotate it.

 

[motownmartin]

Got it Dave, thanks, you're a star

 

[Ross K]

THanks for all the advice, chaps!

 

[mailee]

Hmm, intresting stuff this but is there any way of adding the image to the library or can it only be saved into the model you are working on? :?

 

[SketchUp Guru]

Easy as pie.

Open the secondary Material window (little plus sign near the upper right corner.) and set it to the desired library, Wood in this case. Set the primary window to In Model. Click and drag the new material from the In Model window to the Wood window. Done.