Advanced painting/texture techniques

I’d like to do some more advanced painting of my models and I’m looking at models in the 3D warehouse for inspiration and education. I’ve tried searching for examples or how-tos but I think I’m not using the right terminology to find what I want. For example, this model:

I see all of the detail graphics are handled by hidden geometry as opposed to a projected texture, but what techniques are generally used to get there? Projection of a photo on the model and then manual tracing in the model? I have some simple decorations I want to do like aircraft numbers and I’m just trying to figure out the workflow.

What version of SketchUp are you using? This information is helpful in helping you. Please complete your profile with the correct info on SketchUp version, operating system, and graphics card.

Sure, I updated my profile. I’m using both 2021 and 2019, Pro on both - 2019 will eventually be upgraded to 2021, that’s a company IT issue as opposed to licensing. Graphics cards aren’t too heavy, a lowly Radeon R7 450 with 1GB RAM on Windows 10.

I think the most straight forward way would be to intersect faces with each other- make a component with an extruded version of the stencil, copy it inside the component of the plane geometry, then right click > ‘intersect faces with context’ (intersect with model affects the whole model, context affects only the opened component) while making sure it doesn’t punch all the way through.


It should leave behind an outline on the geometry which can be filled in. There’s probably plugins and other tools like sandbox > drape that do similar but intersect is a lot more predictable.

If the decorations you have are 2d pictures you’ll have to sketch them up in sketchup and extrude it to make the stencil. If they’re just numbers there’s plenty of fonts to choose from in the 3d text tool, and it’ll auto generate extruded text for you.

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Thanks, I’ve done that process before but I was hoping there was something better. On the plus side I’m better with the bezier curve tools so it’s not as cumbersome to make some of the more complex logos and what not.