Hello, I’m a furniture maker and cabinetmaker who would like to create custom textures for wood materials. What I’d like are two types of materials for each wood to then use for my OpenCutList extension. Example: I need walnut in solid wood and walnut in sheetgood.
How can I import a jpg image of a wood, such that I can orientate the grain as I desire? This is also an issue sometimes when I go to the CutList.
Do I need one texture for horizontal grain and one texture for vertical?
Do I need one texture for sheetgood and one for solid wood?
How can I tell the texture to not display so large? In the photo you can see the grain is far too blown up. I have tried shrinking the dimensions of that texture but that does nothing.
My import process looks like this: click “New Texture”, select JPG image, name it.
after you paint the material on the face you want to, right-click the face, click texture>position, and you will be able to rotate, move, and scale the texture on that face. than sample the material from the face and paint the other faces with it.
Best to first draw a face of a size that you think the texture should cover. Then import the image as texture and immediately place it on that face.
If you bring the texture in through the materials window, you can assign the size there.
If the texture was not imported at the right size, changing the dimensions in the Materials window edit pane SHOULD change the size and IMO is the best way in this case. Using Texture / Position for this is just for on-the-fly manipulations. If you use Position to resize you will have to sample it afterwards to apply that size, the In Model Materials will still carry the wrong size.
I do use sampling to copy orientation while working and apply it to other faces, if I am not using something like ThruPaint. I am not a woodworker but need to do this for architectural models. If you are doing a model that is a single piece of furniture and you want to apply one or two textures at different orientations, you may find it helpful to have both orientations in the In Model Materials (for me this would be too many textures). To do that you have to edit a duplicate of the material in a pixel editor and change the orientation. You do this through the Materials window edit pane.
One option is to select the In Model texture, then go to your materials collection and drag the texture from the thumbnail next to the eye dropper at the bottom (left of the palette area) up into the collection.
Don’t bother creating horizontal and vertical wood grain materials. The orientation is easy enough to deal with in the model and having one material is easier to manage.
If you are going to create solid wood walnut and a plywood walnut textures, easiest option would be to use two differently named images imported separately.
If you are going to be creating a bunch of materials you might also consider doing that without a proper model. Create your plywoods, for example, and then under the List drop down choose Duplicate and name the folder “Plywoods” or something. Start a new SketchUp session and repeat for the solid woods.
I have created libraries by species basically using that method. Then I can add to them as I need to later.
Here’s my Pine library. Two sets of pine textures, one to represent unfinished pine and the other with a slightly warm finish.
The thumbnails don’t show as square patches of texture because these are all somewhere around 12’ long and the widest ones are a little over 20 inches wide.
You’re using SketchUp 2017 Make for your work? I see that’s the case from your website and FB pages. You need to be using SketchUp Pro, not SketchUp Make.
As for making seamless textures, it could probably be done if you don’t care about realism.
As @DaveR tells people, the only way to get “seamless” wood texture that is also realistic is to start with a photo of a board at least as large as the object in the model you will apply it to. Import it as an image onto a face the size of the actual board and then convert the image into a texture. If the original board is large enough, you can shift the texture around from board to board to avoid the fake look of all boards the same.
The texture menu will only appear if the selection is a single face because its manipulations don’t make sense except with respect to a single face.
If you rotate the texture on one face, you should be able to use the eyedropper to select the texture from that face, and the bucket tool to apply it to another face (with the same rotation). If you select it from the materials panel, it uses the default orientation.
Seamless textures are fine if the work is not up close (or very large areas). I don’t think it would be as good for renderings of single pieces of furniture. Then again for quick studies why not?
