What causes this?
In SketchUp, each face has a front and a back face, both of which can be painted.
As @MikeWayzovski said. Normally you would not paint the back faces because they should be on the inside of the 3D objects you are modeling.
Notice that you only see that if only surfaces are selected. If your selection includes edges and faces, you only see the front face property.
One face:
One face and four edges:
Likewise you only see length information for edges only
So what’s the difference between the side and the end?
I was making this into a component when I got the big question mark, have never seen that before is why I’m asking.
Pay attention to what Entity Info indicates you’ve selected.
- Only a face selected.
- A face and edges selected. They don’t all have the same material applied to them.
- Only the end face selected.
- End face and it’s bounding edges. The edges also have the wood material applied to them.
The question mark means there’s more than one material involved. In your example some edges still have the default material applied while the faces and some other edges have the woodgrain material.
There’s 6 faces, 5 of them, when selecting the face and 4 edges (double clicking the face), give the question mark, only the end face gives the result shown in my previous post.
As I wrote already, in the second screen shot where you have the face and the bounding edges selected, there’s more than one material involved. In the last one where you have the end face and it’s bounding edges selected, Entity Info is showing you that ALL of the entities in the selection have the woodgrain material applied.
If you double click the face to get the face and four lines, and then paint them, the lines get that paint property too. Default settings, however, aren’t usually set to show edges with paint color, they’re usually set to black, so you don’t see this fact. Try tuning it on to see it. (Color > By Material)
If you select just a face and paint it, and then double click to get a face and four lines, you get the question mark because the face and the edges don’t have the same paint color.
I think the interface would be clearer if there were three fixed swatch fields for edge, front face and back face, and then line through them when not applicable, and a question mark for “varies.” At least it would be more obvious when first learning the program.
It’s actually more complicated than that, and probably would create more confusion: you can paint each of the edges separately from the face! The dialog would have to expand to show however many edges the face has.
That’s true, and you can have more than one face selected, each with a different paint color. The current behavior is to show a question mark when that happens. That’s not unlike other applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. I should think it still works that way, but having another symbol for “not applicable” or “greyed out and can’t use” is visual feedback as to whether there are or aren’t edges or faces among the selection.