Hi.
Can anyone tell me how to get a selection of materials and colors that go beyond what is stock with Sketchup? I am often wanting to use benjamin moore colors or trying to find metals like copper or Blackened steel. Are there resources for these?
Search the 3D Warehouse. There are a number of sets of Benjamin Moore colors available there. Once you get the file open in SketchUp, you can save the materials as a new library or collection.
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Some great resources are textures.com, sketchuptextureclub.com, and like Dave said, the 3DWH. If you find a model with the texture you want, you can just download the material itself by clicking on the word “material” in the model’s details page. That will bring up the list of materials for download.
Let us know if that works for you!
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www.sketchuptextureclub.com has some great textures.
You can also edit materials in SketchUp and use the match color tool to match any color within your model or visible on your monitor.
When you get one of these broad palettes of materials in the warehouse, only some textures will be useful.
If you go to Materials toolbox, and select “In Model”…you;ll see all textures in the model, including the palette you just imported.
Any you like and want to keep, right click on the texture sample thumbnail in the materials menu, and select Save As, and you will be able to path to a folder and save as a .skm file.
I find it helpful to put all my textures in a master folder called Sketchup- Materials, or whatever, then under that, group folders by types of materiel: Flooring, Textiles, Wood, Stone, Brick, Metal and so forth.
Do your “Save As” to these folders as appropriate. Build your own library as you work over the years.
Some of these materials may need editing as often the scale is not optimal.
You can get any material into your model by bringing in objects from other models as well. So if you see a cool house with awesome woodgrain and stone on the warehouse, copy those objects into your model, and follow the procedure above.
I will often make a working model dedicated to a certain material category while I work. For instance, a Stone folder, contains a model called Stone.skp and all sorts of objects and textures can be dumped there while they are cleaned up and sorted. When you’re done saving all skm textures to the appropriate spot, you can delete the model.
A final suggestion is to assemble the materials you use most often into a pallet. For example, if you model basic buildings frequently, you may want your typical two concrete textures, those four awesome wood textures, the two roof shingle textures, the light and the dark grass, the custom window glass, etc.
In your model, make a bunch of little circles or squares…copy an array or something. Say two foot squares…
then paint each of the little solids with one of your favorite materials.So you’ll end up with maybe three columns of these materiel swatches. Hopefully you have named the materials something logical such as Brick-001-Antique Red, Wood_007-Natural maple veneer, etc.
Now, make a component of all of these favorites…save it to your hard drive where you save other sketchup libraries of stuff. I put mine in a Graphics folder. Call it Typical Small House Materials Pak, or something.
Now whenever you open a brand new file to start modeling, the first thing you do is import that component and all your favorite materials are now conveniently in the model. You can do another one for plan diagram colors…like when you color code circulation one color, offices another color, toilet rooms another color, etc. You can take a similar approach to get a bunch of standard Layers into your model.
Lastly (really!), regarding Benjamin Moore or Sherwin Williams colors, you can get the RBG numbers on all these colors online…then, make a new material, don’t use the color wheel, use RBG. Enter the three numbers (Ex: 203, 56, 189) and you will have the exact color. Name it by the paint manufacturers name and number system. Save to library.
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