What I want to do is make a wrought iron fence in a diamond pattern. I tried using a hatch from the patterns and rotating it, but it looks crappy. I was wondering if someone makes a grid extension that you can vary the angle away from 90 degrees to get a more elegant shape?
G
Is the problem that the grid isnât divided into squares? You could edit the material so they are squares. Or you could make your own texture by drawing the grid as you want it in SketchUp and exporting an image to use as a texture.
I did a similar thing for a friend who needed a basket weave tile texture. This is a screen shot of the tile in SketchUp that I used to create the image.
And here is the tile as a seamless texture image.
When I downloaded some hatches previously, they were a specific size so they interlocked seamlessly. Yours doesnât seem the be done that way. Will this will work on any size image or drawing?
I was asking about the variable angle option so it could be adjusted easily. Would the scale tool work to tweak the image?
g
My texture is seamless.
You can rotate a texture and adjust its size if it is applied to a face. Right click on the face and select Texture>Position. You can rotate the texture and change its size with the green pin.
Yes, But! I wanted to squish the texture so the diamonds were no longer squares. You did give me an idea of how to do it - I used the scale tool to squish the texture into what I wanted. But sadly, the designer wasnât happy - she wanted them transparent so she could see the background through it. How the heck do I do that?
G
Check the fence textures in the Landscape collection of the materials. There are some transparant images of fences.
SketchUp creates faces, thus no transparancy (no matter how you set the opacity of that faceâs material, when imported back in as texture)
Since youâll also have LayOut, I would create the texture there, youâll have control over the linethickness, color etc. Export as png and import the png into SketchUp
Wow! Thanks! So I can create a transparent texture in layout? How do I set it to be transparent? I wish they had more, like various wrought iron textures.
Not only LayOut, but even SketchUp lets you create that fence with daimond shaped âsquaresâ with transparent holes, to be used as seemless texture, seemless if created right.
Create the desired design on a rectangle, the pattern angled if you wish, with all its edges and faces.
Delete the unwanted faces that need to become transparent.
Export the result as a png with the option âTransparent backgroundâ
What has been deleted (no face) will be transparent in the png. You can use the png as seemless texture later.
Even the free web version has this option.
As said, you do not want the faces between the edges. In LayOut, I feel that you have more control over the various apects of lines (Color, Width, dashes) Here is one were I use the standard Grid in LayOut:
The trick is to print the margins, which are set to 0.
You can draw the pattern in SketchUp or LayOut or some other application. And getting the transparency is easy enough. You just need to end up with a PNG to import into SketchUp.
You can make whatever patterns you need for your wrought iron. They donât take all that long to make.
Here I create a pattern based on an iron grate I found in an image search. I drew the grate at 20 x 20 but imported it at 10 x 10. I used a dark gray on the model of the grate but edited the color in PaintDOTNet which is the image editor I used.
Scale is NOT the best way to edit modify the size of a texture. If you want to change the size of the texture, do it in the Materials panel. If you want to change only one direction as you show, click on the chain link icon to the right of the dimensions to unlink them.
Well, thank you. This is really helpful. G
Just a note. I edited my previous post to make the sentence about scaling textures read correctly.
I turned off edges in the style before making the image export so they arenât visible in the texture.
Itâs worth noting that you could just make a couple of linear arrays of edges and be done with it.
Wait a moment. What I hate about resizing textures by changing the numbers, or unlinking the upper and lower boxes, is how clunky it is. I wish there was a slider in addition to the number box, so you can quickly zoom it to the size you want.
G
Then use the push pins to resize it. Right click on the texture on the face and choose Texture>Position. Move the pins as needed. Or right click again deselect Fixed Pins so you can drag the pins independently.
I tried to save a texture I found on line that I cropped in Paint ( in the windows accessories) but it wouldnât save the transparency. You said, that you can in paintdotnet, but I couldnât figure out how to do it - could you explain it in a little more detail?
As you can see my first attempt is kinda lame.
G
PainDOTNet is not Paint. Itâs a freeware image editor that has much more capability than Paint.
Since I used an image exported from SketchUp, it was exported with the background transparent. If you are starting with a JPG or some other image that doesnât have a transparent background, you have to make it transparent. I select the background using the Magic Wand tool and then hit Delete. The transparent pixels are displayed as a grey and white checkerboard in the image editor.
When the image is ready to be saved, you have to save it as a PNG because the JPGâs donât support transparency.
Okie dokie
G
Are those thick verticals in your texture intentional?
No. I told you it was lame. 
