Inherit material from topographic layer - why?

I have made a terrain model, added some roads using the Vali Architect script and I am ready to mass out the existing buildings. I turn the terrain off (making it flat), draw a rectangel on the location of an existing building and extrude - only to see the box having the terrain material applied to it.

That’s ok - I thought - I’ll just apply the standard material. However, when I’m turning on the terrain again, the build gets invisible. Turning off the terrain again, the builds back.

I’m not drawing in the terrain group, and I realize it has to do with layers and materials, but I can’t figure it out.


The box on the right is how the rectangel gets extruded, the one on the left is how I want it to look like automatically.


This is how it looks like when the terrain is turn on - only the lines stays - but the material/faces get invisible.

It looks to me as if you’ve unlocked the flat location image and exploded it before you started drawing. The face of the location would be on the Location Snapshot layer after exploding but the edges you are drawing are on Layer 0 (or some other layer if you didn’t leave layer 0 active as you should). When you switch to seeing the terrain layer, the location layer gets turned off so the faces disappear but the edges remain because Layer 0 is still active.

I’ve duplicated that here and I’m toggling the terrain and location snapshoy layers back and forth.

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Hi DaveR, that’s right. Part of the process is exploding the terrain. This is to get the road line and terrain to “communicate”. The terrain is later grouped and locked, but it still happens as shown above. I am drawing on layer 0, is it any way I can get the default material automatically applied. Or is it stuck like this once the terrain is exploded?

I don’t understand why you would explode the location image since you have the same image on the terrain. In any case, going forward, you need to group the image again to prevent it geometry from combining with the the new geometry you draw. It’s nothing different than drawing anything else in SketchUp.

As for fixing your mistake, you can select those faces on the massing model and change them to Layer 0. Then you can repaint them as needed. I expect you now have a hole in your image face, where you pulled the building up.

If you are trying to use the image as a texture on the roads and such, you don’t need to explode the location image. The texture is already in the In Model materials library.

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