I wish… they would put a feature in the material edit box that would allow you to change the orientation of the material being applied like you can in Acad hatching rather than having to manipulate the reference file and resave as unique material.
Why not just rotate the material on the face?
Or rotate in less than 90° increments with the green push pin.
Once you’ve rotated it on one face, you can sample the rotated material to apply it to other faces with the same orientation. See this for more.
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+1 on this feature request! A simple way to rotate the texture in the material creation dialog box would be very handy. This is something that I always expect to show up “in the next version,” and I’m always surprised that it hasn’t been implemented yet.
The workaround is reasonable, but ultimately it’s just a workaround - it would be much faster to be able to rotate the texture from within the material definition. This also makes it easy to rotate the texture for all objects that already have that texture applied (when the client is standing over my shoulder and would like to see what it would look like if the siding ran vertically instead of horizontally). We end up making a lot of our textures in a 90 degree rotated version in Photoshop to make it quicker to switch.
Thanks!
Jason
Unfortunately transformations only pipette/paint for materials painted onto a face directly - you can’t paint a component/group and expect the transformation to be applied to every “default” texture within it.
(It’s also only the scale and rotation that are applied - any skewing of the texture is lost)
Personally I like the fact that you can use one texture in multiple areas with different positions, sizes and rotations; change the colour balance or transparency of the texture and it rolls through everything.
However I would like the ability to change the fill on a component/group just like you can on a face.
BTW @jswolfe you don’t need to use Photoshop to make a 90º texture - if you want, you simply draw a square of the same size as the material, then fill and rotate the texture 90º, then use the “Make Unique Texture” option from the r-click menu. Done.
@gadget2020 - That works pretty well. Still, I’d much rather have that option in the material creation dialog. It ends up being a lot of little steps to achieve the goal (figure out what size that texture is, create a box of that size, apply texture, rotate, sample). And our textures are often not square, and are definitely not any consistent size…
I played around with the rotated textures per your technique, and I noticed that the textures seemed to be handling their UV coordinates “unexpectedly” - I had some issues where the texture didn’t line up from one face to another as it would with a standard texture. Could just be my model though…
I agree that it can be handy to have the same texture exist in lots of different rotations, etc. so that when you change one, you change them all, but that’s not the only use case. If you want to rotate all instances of that texture after the fact, you would need to make a new texture and re-texture all of the affected parts.
It would make initial material creation quicker (don’t have to go through a multi-step process to create rotated textures - at which point photoshop is about as quick and is a permanent solution), but the biggest benefit is that it would make editing the materials later on much easier. Rather than creating a new rotated material and then applying that, I could just rotate the original material (like changing its scale) and have the whole model update. It seems like it would make exploring design options just that much faster, and, from the perspective of someone who doesn’t write programs, it seems like it would be easy to implement. It’s very common in other modeling and rendering softwares to be able to do this - I’ve always thought that this was a curious omission on SketchUp’s part…
Jason
Matt Chambers just showed me this:
Make a rectangle on the ground (or on the same plane as what you are painting).
Paint it with your texture.
Select the surface.
Using the rotate tool, rotate the actual rectangle 45 degrees or whatever degree you want.
Using the paint bucket’s eyedropper tool, sample the material from the rotated rectangle, and then apply it to the surface you want it on.
No need to alter the texture in any way.
A button might be nice, though.
@katyakean, I use an alternative method that obviates the need to draw a rectangle on the ground. I apply the material to a face in a component and rotate it to suit. Then I can sample from that face for other faces which need the same orientation. I don’t bother to paint something that is only temporary. You can see that sort of thing starting around 15 minutes into the video here. You can also see how I use full length boards for wood grain materials.
I love those wood boards, Dave. Where did you get those?
Thank you @katyakean. I make them myself.
Again, these workarounds work fine, but that’s not really the core issue. Ultimately what would be most useful would be to be able to create a material with a rotated texture. This workaround doesn’t create a new material, it just samples the properties of an edited version that you’ve created.
I often want to use the same image in several different situations where I may need to make other changes to the material other than its rotation. For example, we might use a wood siding texture multiple places on the exterior of a home, but where the siding is horizontal it’s going to be a different color and scale than when it’s vertical.
In your example, if you suddenly decided that it made sense for all of the grain on the project to run the other direction (I know this doesn’t actually apply to that specific piece, but humor me), you can’t globally change that at once. You have to go in and retexture everything.
I realize that there are workarounds - nobody is denying that there are different ways to do this. I’m just saying that the most useful implementation for my workflow (and I believe many others’) would be to give that option in the material properties. Again, this is standard in most other 3d rendering software, so I’ve always thought it was a little weird to be missing - something I’ve always thought that it would surely show up in the next release…
Jason
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