Beginner - Having issues with downloading carpet samples

Hi,

I’m looking to add to the out of the box carpet and paint samples that come with Sketchup. I’d like to find a nice light gray (single color) fur carpet. I’m looking at the 3D warehouse at items like this:

I tried downloading and I’m having two issues:

  1. The new sample does not show up in the materials window under carpets.
  2. If I click on import directly, then click on the surface, I get a weird transparent looking mixture as opposed to the regular carpets that when I paint them on behave as you’d expect.

Please help. I’m a frustrated beginner.

Maybe you should take a look on youtube’s tutorials on how Materials work and other stuff…
If you import it directly to your modelor open it in a new file :
1 The new material is only added to your model in the Materials/In model which means it is only stored in the model’s file.
To save it in your Sketchup library you have to right click on the material shown in your Materials/In Model(that house button) window then Save as then Browse your Sketchup Materials folder(X/Program files/Sketchup/Sketchup 2016/Materials/Carpets…)

2 I don’t know exactly what is going on here, but if you proceed with step 1 you will be good to go.

So that you know, by downloading a model from the 3dwarehouse doesn’t mean you are saving a texture in your Sketchup library, it simply means you will have a file with a texture applied to a surface which texture can be used directly in your actual model or saved in the Library.

Don’t be frustrated and don’t assume things, learn them.

Thanks for the reply and yes, I do learn. I’ve found that many of the tutorials on You Tube leave a lot to be desired as the “instructors” frequently leave out steps or assume the watcher knows something they don’t. It takes quite a while to sort through to find the good ones.

Let me try to explain my issue a bit clearer. This download is coming in as a COMPONENT (.skp file), NOT a material. When I drop it on a surface that’s when I get the odd translucent effect. I would like to either (1) leave it as a component if I can get it to “paint” correctly, or (2) do something to convert it to a material.

BTW, trying to move items to a system folder will throw administrator type errors.

Thanks for the help.

Ed, don’t try to apply the component as if it is was a material. Once you’ve got the component in the model space, you can get its material from the In Model materials window and apply it to other faces within the model.


Here’s the component imported into a model. I placed it so it is floating above the “floor”. You can see the material selected in the In Model library.


Here I’ve applied the material to the floor from the In Model Materials window and then deleted the component I had downloaded. Once you’ve finished with the component, you should purge it from the In Model Components library as there’s no point in keeping it.

To be honest, unless you like that tiled look, I think this material either needs some work in an image editor or you might want to keep looking.

Close all Sketchup instances. Click the link you provided, click download take a version and when it prompts to open or save, chose open . Now the file has a square and the texture applied to it.
Now open the Materials window, click the small house button, right click on the texture shown below in the white window and chose save as and follow the instructions I gave you before.
If you encounter an administrator rights problem, then go to the Sketchup’s shortcut, right click on it, go to Compatibility and down there check Run this program as an administrator, Apply Ok and next time it should work.

If you chose to save the model and then import it into your actual model. You don’t have a material but a component that has a face painted with that material. You can still go to the Material window, hit the small house and look for that specific material, chose it and then paint with it.

Of course all of this if you want to save the material to work with it whenever you want. Otherwise just use the Sample paint and then paint whatever you want.

Personally, I think it would take too much effort to fix the faint outline or halo around the image one pixel at a time. This texture is far from “seamless.” If your bitmap editor has a seamless tile feature that allows you to mirror the image around one or two axes or overlap adjacent tiles, you may be able to fix your image satisfactorily. Otherwise, as Dave said, go shopping some more.

You should seriously consider equipping yourself to make your own seamless tiling textures from photos. With a suitable bitmap editing application (aka “paint” program, aka photo editor) You should be able to bring in an image and quickly crop it and adjuxt to fit up against itself and test out its tiling ability.

There are oodles of photos out there (e.g., via Google Image). You can just grab one that appears to be in the public domain, bring it into your bitmap edior, and turn it into a smoothly repeating tile, which you can then import into SU and make it a material. You can even change its color.

-Gully

Thanks for all the great help. I found a better, seamless carpet sample that I turned into a material that will work nicely.

One last question. I want to create a tiled area like this:

What’s the best approach? Try to create a material with grout on each side and paint it, or draw some type of grid and paint each section, or something else? I figure the brown tile area would have to be done as a second pass.

You’ve shown a fairly narrow view, so it’s hard to tell what kind of an overall pattern you want to create. Have you got a more inclusive view of the pattern? Or, how about a detailed description that paints a photographic picture of the whole pattern?

All I can say is that, ranking possible solutions in terms of overall desirability, first choice would be to come up with some kind of repeating image-based tile that you could just let propagate to cover the surface. You might have to use several images in areas you can bound with edges, meaning that maybe you can create an image based pattern consisting of two or three–or more–pieces. If the picture above depicts a pattern of two concentric rectangles–just to demonstrate the range of possibilities–you could consider an image with a rectangular cutout containing another image.

Last on the list would be to model and paint every tile. Even if you make extensive use of components, making the tiles out of geometry would make a bloated, slow-moving model and it wouldn’t look as good as the image. Well, you can anything well or poorly, but all other things being equal, and image-bsased solution is far preferable for what is, after all, really a 2D graphics problem, not a 3D geometry problem.

-Gully

Sorry, I should have posted a better picture:

They’re 1’x1’ square marble tiles with a glossy finish. The rectangle is a different color tile.

Ideally I’d like to reproduce this as close as possible, including the grout, but if it’s too tough to include the grout that’s OK.

I agree with your thoughts of using a texture as opposed to trying to actually model the tiles.

I’m guessing I would need to get a good image of a tile and then possibly edit the image to include the grout lines, then “paint” it over the surface. Then, do the brown area on a second pass. If there’s a better way let me know.

One think I’m confused about is how big the image should be. I tried using a generic tile image I found, but when it tiled it looked weird of course. How does Sketchup decide how big to make each tile?

Thanks again.

I would do it like this. If you have one seamless tile you can insert your measure there and it will lay the way you want. Then right click over the surface and Texture/Position and arrange it the way you need.

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In the Materials window you should be able to set what width and height the texture represents.

One option you have is to use your own photo as the texture.

floor.skp (313.5 KB)

My preference is to import the images as a material and apply it to a properly sized face. Then there’s no need to edit the dimension in the Materials window.

Apparently I did it exactly the same way as @ely862me, who beat me to it: (notice: the grout line is built right into the tile.) (If it isn’t obvious, both tiles are textures. They’ll just repeat themselves until they run into a barrier.)

-Gully

Wow, thanks everyone this was really helpful! I created tile images using GIMP to skew the edges parallel, then created new materials and positioned/scaled the image to fit. Very cool. Only thing I haven’t figured out (and it’s minor) is how to make the corners of the brown rectangle meet in a diagonal. No biggie; thanks again!

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Just draw in the four diagonals with the Line tool, connecting the endpoints of the concentric rectangles (Although it doesn’t show clearly, like @ely862me, I mitered the corners.)

-Gully

Pls my challenges is how to use interactive rendering command after making changes on my model and I don’t want to stop the ongoing rendering to avoid starting all over again, how do I achieve that. Pls I need immediate response to save my model. Thanks

Are you referring to the use of a rendering program or extension? If you need help, please be specific about which one.

Yeah if both means the same thing, I meant rendering program and extension
but if they are not kindly clear bathe air. Thanks

Then your post has nothing to do with the original topic here?

If you want some assistance, tell us what rendering program you are using and please post as a new topic. Don’t add on to an unrelated topic.