Have downloaded some custom textures and would like to import them into my textures library as new collection.
Thanks!
Hello again!
I did notice that if I were to go back to SU 8 I can find under app support a materials folder with all the different subfolders inside. When I try to locate the same folders in SU 15 I can’t find these folders or they are not visible.
Anyones help on this would be greatly appreciated
JFG
I see you are on Mac w/ OSX Yosemite.
There is a difference between texture files (which are images, like JPG, PNG, etc.) and SketchUp SKM material archive files. (The SKM archive have the texture file within it.)
If your textures are image files, you’ll need to put them somewhere in your user path easy to browse to. Something like:
~/Documents/SketchUp/Textures
Then inside SketchUp you need to create a new material using each texture. These new materials will be “In Model” only materials, until you save them out to a Custom Collection.
Since SketchUp 2014, more and more user files are being moved into the user path, rather than the application’s binary path.
I do not have a Mac, and the Materials Manager interface differs between the PC and Mac SketchUp editions.
Some of the Mac guys will need to weigh in here.
If they are already SKMs, put the sub-folder of SKMs someplace easy to find that is NOT SketchUp version dependant. Like:
~/Documents/SketchUp/Materials
And then within SketchUp create a new collection from the Materials browser context menu.
(Some Mac power users use symbolic links tricks to point at custom materials folders.)
The standard place for materials collections/libraries in SketchUp 2015 on Mac OS X are subfolders of
~/Library/Application Support/SketchUp 2015/SketchUp/Materials/
It is no longer considered good practice to put any of your own Materials into the application bundle or the system’s Library folder.
You can create new collections via the New… item under the List dropdown in the Materials window. (You have to click the materials icon (looks like a brick) at the top of the window before you see this menu and other texture/materials-related items).
Note that SketchUp does not create the base Materials folder until you create your first custom material, and also under versions of OS X since Mavericks your Library folder is hidden by default.
If your materials are already .skm files, you can install them by simply copying the files into the Materials folder or a desired subfolder.
The transition from image files to materials skm files is somewhat awkward and tedious because (so far as I know) the Mac version of SketchUp does not provide any method to do a batch import. There may be a plugin for this (I haven’t looked), but lacking such, you have to create materials one-by-one from the image files using the New Texture… item under the Colors drop-down in the Materials window. For a large collection this can be quite tedious! Note that the new skm files won’t appear in Finder until you close SketchUp.
If you want to use the same materials collections in multiple versions of SketchUp, you have two choices. You can simply copy the folders and their contents to the Materials folder for each version (which works fine but eats up disk space) or you can put them in some personal folder and create links from the Materials folder to them. If you are not an advanced UNIX or Mac OS user, the latter is probably over your head and not a good idea. The Mac SketchUp does not provide a means to set custom paths to these sorts of folders, so you can’t do it from within SketchUp.
Only one issue is that it is version dependent.
Anyway to have one custom collection folder to use with multiple SketchUp versions ?
(I thought you or John Boundy were using symbolic links to common folder.)
I mentioned the possibility of symbolic links in the last paragraph of my post. I use that technique, but in my view it is one of those things that separates Mac users into two disparate camps. If one knows about symlinks and how to create them, the only SketchUp-specific question is where to put the links (which is the version-dependent folder I listed). If one does not know about them, I am reluctant to get into the role of coaching a novice UNIX user in a SketchUp forum.