Is there a quick way to line up materials that are in different groups? See the picture below.
I have 3 groups in this picture but I need the material to look seamless from bottom to top. I am currently going into the material in each group and moving it around until I get it aligned but was wondering if there is a better way.
Thanks for the help
Ryan F.
If you are moving the material [texture] within a group-edit, then it suggests you have correctly applied the materials onto the faces with the group.
Applying a material directly onto a group prevents its adjustment.
Edit one group and adjust its face material-texture using the context-menu texture tools.
When it’s as you want, edit the other two groups in turn and use the Material Browser’s Eyedropper tool to sample the material from the correctly set up face and paint that onto the equivalent face in the group you are editing.
The texture’s should now align to match on all three groups’ faces…
Thanks for the quick response TIG.
That is what I have been doing but there are times when certain faces that the material is on doesn’t line up with the material above or below it. It frustrating is all. I was hoping there was a plug-in that would automatically align materials.
With this particular job I realized after my post what some of my issue was. I mirrored the apartment units but made the floor one continuous group (not tied in with the mirrored components). When I applied the material to the walls in the components the material flips on the mirrors units which then made it so the floor material would not line up on the mirrored half the building.
I believe Tig’s answer is the correct way to apply textures so they map correctly to scale when adjacent.
Another possible fix might be to temporarily explode your group and then regroup it to reset the UV?
As TIG suggested, you can sample the texture and its mapping from the group above with the eyedropper tool (With an active paint bucket tool, hold Alt (or Command on Mac)). Apply the sample to the other group’s geometry.
The important point is that you are texturing the raw geometry in the group and not group entity
Hope this helps
CD
But… if the group’s geometry has been changed (scaled), which often happens, it seems the UV map is changed and the eye dropper doesn’t work as expected.( you can see in my gif it doesn’t do anything when I try to reapply the sampled texture). I’ve then found that by exploding and regrouping, the UV gets reset and the texture can be reapplied as expected as in your example…unless there is another way around this?.
You try my extension s4u Paint
https://extensions.sketchup.com/extension/d4e95043-aa40-488f-ad7b-8fddb2de9b37/s4u-paint-4
Thanks for the help on this.
Thanks
If you are going down the extension route, there are a few that may help speed up complex texturing. Along with s4u Paint, another helpful extension is Fredo’s Thrupaint feature that is part of his general FredoTools toolset
Cheers
Chris
Further to the original post, I have the same issue and also use the eyedropper technique suggested, but it only works when the materials are exactly the same (pattern & colour). I often have adjacent materials with the same pattern but different colours, for which I cannot simply use the eyedropper.
The simplest example is a brick wall painted in 2 different colours. I need the bricks to line up across the colours. I currently have to manually move/scale the 2nd material but this is very time consuming across a whole building. I am hoping someone knows a tool that can apply scale and position to different materials whilst not affecting colour.
If the brick elements in the textures have the same alignment over the entire image and are the same size, they should be simple enough to align. It would be easiest if the brick texture is sized so the wall is some multiple of it’s texture’s length. Here I have two different colors of brick. Both texture images are 58 inches long and my wall sections are 116 inches long. They aligned automatically when I added the textures to the faces.
Yes that works in an ideal situation where your walls are all the perfect size to line up with textures, but in reality the buildings I’m working with have walls with many sizes, shapes, angles, cutouts etc. See example here. I normally try to line up one surface then eyedropper this around to the other surfaces. It mostly works but occasionally plays up and needs re-aligning.
There’s no way that SketchUp can identify the features in the texture. All it knows is the size and orientation of the image. You can use the Texture>Position feature to align the textures easily, though. Of course they need to be the same size in the first place but there’s no reason the materials you show shouldn’t be already. If they aren’t you need to fix that and also look at your process for creating new materials.
Here I have two tile materials. The rectangles in the foreground ar sized to fit the materials so there’s no repeat.
The corner of the white tile texture is at the corner of the group it’s on.
To get the black tile texture to align with the white one, set the red pin to the same corner it’s on for the white one.
Hi DaveR, Thanks for preparing this detailed explanation. I am familiar with the principles you show here and I think for more complex scenarios with materials that have been scaled and rotated off-axes I will just have to be more diligent in setting up the materials and aligning them before applying to the model. Sometimes working fast I’ll apply say the metal_corrugated_shiny material and scale/rotate it randomly to simulate a reflective surface. Then I might come back later and add some detail including the 2nd colour version. Without knowing exactly how much I rotated the 1st one it becomes a challenge to get them to align.
The moral I’m getting here is to resist laziness and set up both materials properly before applying them.
