For instance… I’m drawing a fence using 4x6 posts vertically and 1x6 boards horizontally. I’d like the grain horizontal, naturally, in the 1x6. The grain looks silly horizontal on the posts. I’ve seen a few tutorials that involve rotating the image using grab tags on the edge but they are a bit complicated. Is there and easy command for just rotating the paint via the “bucket” 90 degrees?
Heres my method, which works perfectly for what I think you need to acheive. the advantage is that this uses only 1 material and makes sure that the mateiral is easy to edit , scale, or swap for a different material.
1: Model the verticle parts of the fence (eg the Posts) and group them.
2. Model the horizontal parts of the fence (eg the boards) and group them. You can have sub-groups if needed.
(note at this point both of these groups and everything within them should be coloured as the Default SKP material, (white, front faces pointing outward)
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use the paintbucket tool to paint the desired woodgrain material onto both groups. One of them will have the material oriented the wrong way. That’s fine.
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Open the Group which has the material oriented the wrong way (the posts, in your case) then select and rotate all the geometry by 90 degrees (X or Y axis) so that the posts are now facing horizontally. The material should now also be aligned correctly with the posts. Then Close the group.
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Then take that same group and rotate it so that the posts are positioned correctly and the fence looks normal. Use the paintbucket tool to make both groups into the Default material.
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Select both groups and turn into a fence component. Use the paintbucket tool to add the material to the componet and notice how it applies in the correct orientation.
Hopefully AK_SAM is writing something about rotating textures. Another solution would be to do a vertical post on its side, then rotate it afterwards.
Thank you all very much for the quick replies. Sam that is a valid work-around but it is similar to the tutorials I’ve seen. DaveR that is an improvement and for now the one I will attempt. I used sketchup quite a bit 15 years ago and really enjoyed it. But I’m getting back into it and installed 2019 professional onto a new Dell 5520 Precision 4K laptop with Quadro graphics. Finally had to retire the old HP Workstation 32bit Windows 7 workhorse that has served me so well. So I was really excited to try Sketchup on the much improved PC.
There are certainly improvements, but for my very simple needs these improvements tend to just get in the way of what originally drew me to the simple pleasures of sketchup for a hobbiest. I do woodworking, architectural for my home, simple mechanical for welding and mototcycle building, and rube goldberging whatever comes to mind…
I have to say I’m astonished at the lack of something so seemingly fundamental to the menus of the ‘paint bucket’ 15 years hence.
I’m a very very “low power” user but even I can see the utility of an option in the paint bucket menu window to rotate the orientation of textures, by whatever degree you choose, so that each subsequent click/fill with the bucket on your project, or even click/fill on a whole group, applies that degree of orientation. Instead we are left with some cumbersome workarounds for something pretty fundamental.
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The method I use is really best suited for large projects with lots of fences which may need to be modified later, because selecting all fences and filling them with a new material becaomes so much quicker (just one click). It’s also useful if you save your Fence component and use it in other projects (you never have to edit and rotate textures again as it’s already set up).
But rotating the material is perfectly fine if your project is a one-off/bespoke design or you dont intend to re-use your fence component on other models.
There is still a bug which Sketchup haven’t fixed where the “Texture” menu sometimes doesn’t appear, which means you can’t rotate the texture. You seem to have to come out, go in, open the paint bucket tool again and again until it finally shows… Perseverance.
This is what happens if you select more than one face, even a smoothed edge between two or more faces that looks like one face will stop the ‘Texture’ option popping up.
You must select one single face, not even a face with an edge, only the face for it to work.
Double clicking a face will select the face and it’s edges, causing it not to show.
If it is shape made up of multiple faces you must turn on hidden geometry and select just one face.
It is entirely predictable, unless you have something else going on with your system.
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the eneroth texture positioning tool, and other workarounds, are still just extensions of “workarounds” to what originally should have been a simple addition to the paint bucket menus. Any requirement to ‘make component’, ‘group’, select individual panels…highlight…rotate, one at a time, etc, etc, etc, just to change the orientation of the original pattern could have been made completely unnecessary with an option right from the start, while filling objects, edges, groups, with the paint bucket pointer to choose the orientation.
Then if you decide later to change the orientation of the face of an otherwise difficult, or imposssible, to rotate surface, you just go back to the paint bucket and select the new orientation.
Again… wild that it’s not an option. Is it a plugin somewhere that we’re missing?
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I guess I haven’t thought it too hard to use the native methods, but I do like Fredo6 ThruPaint for various uses. You don’t even have to open groups to paint on them. Orientation (the 90 deg 180 deg selections) of texture could be “higher up” in the native commands, instead of a sub-menu of a sub-menu, I don’t think it could get into the paint bucket window. They have enough trouble with that functioning just to put colors in the model. I think it is limited by the OS.
Dissatisfied with SketchUp improvements? Get in line!
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I mostly set the local axes in such way that the material is correctly oriented everywhere in that piece, without any explicit per face texture mapping.
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meaning?: Red and Green not along the length (=perpendicular to the length) and so Blue along the length of the piece, right?
Usually I have X (red) as the length, Y as depth/width and Z as height. This works for materials with a horizontal direction.
Right, my bad I suppose. In fact we’re both right. I was focussing on a metal texture in the library that runs vertical and that I wanted to run along a long component laying flat on the floor.
Wasn’t there a post in this thread yesterday that was animated and showed how to do this in a fairly elegant way? Was it removed by member for some reason? I came back here to follow its directions and it’s gone?
Duh. Could someone walk me through the attached, without using an extension. I tried AK_SAM’s way without success. My default style is primarily ‘Shaded with Textures’. I tried it with other default styles. The textures I’m using are from Sketchuptextureclub. I’ve tried rotating the swatches without success. Thanks.Patas.skp (6.8 MB)
When positioning texture there are fixed pins, that can quickly do rotation and skew, and other things. But there are also non-fixed pins. With those you can briefly click to pick them up, and put them where you want the source texture to come from. Then you can drag the pins to the geometry corners you want the texture to go between.
In this screen recording I hide rest of model to make it easier to get to the ends of the piece of wood, and I deselect the Fixed Pins option.
Thanks Colin. That works; a little cumbersome, but better than nothing.