Individual Shape Textures, Different Tints, Using Same Texture?

I have multiple shapes (components) that I would like to apply a single texture to only using different tints or shades. SketchUp (SU) appears to adjust the tints to all shapes if they use the given texture when I adjust the edit color slider… I take it SU doesn’t allow what I’m trying to do here?

For clarity, here’s an example of what I’m trying to accomplish:

Let’s say you have a project where you’re planning out a home renovation, like a new bedroom or porch. Sometimes you might want to give some 2x4s or whatever different wood stains but they should all have the same texture… Can SU do that?

Insight is appreciated and thanks in advance.

You can use the same texture as the starting point… but at some point that will have to be duplicated enough times to accommodate the color steps you want to have.

… and each of those steps will be individual (copied) textures… albeit with different color shifts in the edit.

This is kind of the same thing with the components as well… Each Component is just a definition to tell SU how every instance of the component should look and they are all identical copies.

To get some level of independence you’ll have to work with nested components, and/or branch off to independent components which is what the ‘Make Unique’ Command does.


There may be some hope for this, in that somebody might have made a gradient tool which allows for incremented stepping in between two colors points. That would be great, but I haven’t seen such a thing yet. (maybe because I haven’t been looking ?).


So my take on this, is probably less than ideal… in that I think you have to approach this dealing with unique and independent sections in the model, and the individual textures that will be applied to them.

Subdivisions can be made with regular lines, and those lines can be hidden so the overall effect is of a singular board, with all of the color steps you want. But at the micro level these are all independent faces, and textures.


Luckily, I’m not the final word on this, and maybe others have come up with a better method.

I think you will have to make each one of these unique. You can use the same texture (woodgrain) and then tint it different colors in the editor, but each variation would need to be saved as a “unique” texture and applied in specific instances. Textures in SU don’t have any layering capabilities.
One way to deal with this might be as dynamic components, just to be able to change out the colors, but those components would change globally in the model. Maybe someone more fluent in DC could give an opinion.

I don’t think DC is possible because when I go into it, the dialogue indicates that no options exist for it…

Each board is its own component…and I can’t seem to make any of them unique as the “Unique” right-click option is disabled / grayed-out. Maybe I’m doing something wrong?

In the materials browser, you edit a Materials object. Any changes (changing the tint) appear everywhere where this material is used. There cannot be variants of the same material object without having separate material objects. Thus you can duplicate materials and modify the copies.

Dynamic components do not change that, but it might be possible that a dynamic component can be made configurable to swap its material by another one from a set of included materials.

Hello Everyone, I was trying to find a solution for this just now, and the way I did was simple.
I created a new file, Copied the model I wanted to tint with the same texture, went to materials>In model. Selected the material, Changed the tint how I wanted within the edit tab, and copied it back to my original model. Takes less than a minute.
Hope this helps someone!