Just a quick heads up—ChatGPT can now generate textures.
You can ask for seamless wood, concrete, tiles, etc., and it’ll create it for you.
Might be worth thinking about with all the changes to the SketchUp material library lately.
Anyone else tried this yet?
Feel free to try this prompt. I made it for D5 Render, but it could work with SketchUp too.
Create a realistic, seamless texture specifically for D5 Render. The texture must be tileable without visible seams in any direction. If the texture contains grids or repetitive patterns (like tiles), the spacing between lines should be consistent, and edges must align mathematically—e.g., if the left edge ends with a 0.1-unit line, the right edge starts with 0.1 to maintain perfect seamlessness. The texture should be a top-down, flat view, with no perspective distortion. Prioritize photorealism and uniform lighting. Output should be suitable for high-quality architectural visualization. Do not stylize—keep it realistic.
since it’s all based on stolen content online, and there are several class actions on this, I wonder, who owns the copyright on these images, and what are the allowed uses ?
no that I’ll use them, between SU’s PBR, the warehouse ones, sketchup texture club, architexture and the other (similar) one on sketchucation which name evades me right now, plus twinmotion and the user materials free on substance…
I think I have enough materials.
There’s always going to be debate over what’s “authentic.”
As they say: “A good artist creates. A great artist steals.”
But hey—SketchUp isn’t about perfection. It’s about building fast.
If a tool helps you get there quicker, why not use it?
yeah well picasso was also an ass and a despicable human, maybe we don’t have to take everything he said literally can we ? And just because someone famous said something some time ago doesn’t mean it’s gospel is it ? (I don’t even respect the gospel in a first place…)
I’m not talking about authenticity. I’m talking about ownership, legal right of use, and copyright. and actual quality.
the kind of stuff professionals deal with.
I would state that seamless materials are (and should be) in the public domain. Especially textures from existing or manufactured materials (bricks, tiles, etc)
A lot of manufacturers already have texture generators.
Might be different for handmade ‘special’ textures which are being sold on various websites, though. A five year period of copyright might be in place. Copyright was intended to boost and protect creatives originally, but if anything that ever was created still had copyright on it and artists would be worrying about it all the time it works counterproductive.
Not sure what is used for the AI, but a lot of it was already in the public domain, we might hope?
Giving the AI such precise prompts could shift the copyright to the prompter (although an AI could be used to create the prompt)
—-The future of visualization is prompting…
super cool, just tried it myself, your prompt is great, thank you for sharing!
a lot of manufacturers aren’t on Architextures yet, or even have their own seamless textures, so this does help. think that might be the main benefit, there’s a couple vendors where I could ask gpt-4o to make the seamless textures for me, and then save them to my Architextures library to use in SketchUp
my main thing, with this and even with random SketchUp and D5 materials, is what’s the point of using a material you can’t actually build with, source locally where your project is, or not from one of your favorite vendors you have relationships with? not interested in making things look pretty to just look pretty, and confusing clients with what’s feasible.
sure there are legal implications, but this feels like probably one of the least concerning uses of AI copyright compared to everything else.
added to your prompt to do a Web Search first and grab all the product specs, to add that to the image generation prompt.
my dream workflow is to prompt some things like this, but from my own set up of building blocks and library.
also, think a bit of UI to help tune in textures is nice, Polycam has this a bit, AI Texture Generator for Blender, Unreal, Unity | Polycam
