My own specific Patterns Textures, Components, and etc

Question to all of you. As my design business is getting bigger I noticed I use some specific patterns, textures and components (PTC’s) repeatedly. So I find myself always opening a past design to find these specific PTC’s. Is there a way to load my personal PTC’s into SU so they show up under the defaults every time? Thanks and have a good one.

Yes, in the materials toolbar select ‘open or create a collection’, once that is done you can add that collection to your favourites and it will be there each time you start a new instance.

You can create new local collections for Components by, as Liam indicated, opening the Details menu and choosing the right option. On the Mac it looks like this:
2018-06-16_14-39-32

If you just want to create a new collection spot, choose Create a new collection… You can add components to it after it is created. If you have a file full of components you want to save in a common collection you can use Save as a local collection. It’s grayed out in my screen shot because there’s nothing in the file I have open.

If you want to save components into an existing collection, there’s two ways. You can open the secondary pane in the Components window by clicking on the white + on the black field in the upper right corner of the Components window. Set one to In Model and the other to the desired collection. Then drag the thumbnails from In Model to the other collection. You can also right click on the component in the model and choose Save as…

For materials on the Mac it’s a bit different. If you want to save all the In Model textures in a single collection click on the drop down and select Duplicate.

If you want to create a new collection for later use, choose New.

If you want to add materials to a collection later, drag them from the In Model colors to the palette at the bottom of the window. Then change to the desired collection and drag from the palette back up.

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Yes, as well as the suggestions offered previously, you could just add your "PTC"s to a new SU file and save that file as your primary template to open whenever you start SketchUp. This may be the easiest and fastest way to get the results you requested.

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Skp 18 on a mac here…
Trying your suggestion here to drag the materials down to that palette at the bottom but they are not sticking… any thoughts as to how to get this to work?

Are they textures? If so, select it in the Colors in Model pane. It’ll show as a thumbnail to the left of the eye dropper. Drag it from the thumbnail image to the left of the eye dropper into the palette area.

YES! that worked, thank you…

On a similar topic, I have a folder with about 20 textures I have downloaded elsewhere… is there a way to

  1. Import these into a collection in one shot?
  2. Be able to import that collection into a different model for future use.

Excellent! And you’re welcome.

What file type are these 20 textures? What you want to do can certainly be done but exact steps depend on what you are starting with.

They are all . jpg and i simply have them in a finder folder right now.

OK. You won’t be able to import them in one step unfortunately. Long ago there was an extension that would do a mass import of images as textures but I don’t believe it works in newer versions. Even if it did, you still have to go through them one at a time to set their scale so it wouldn’t save you much.

Start a new Sketchup file that has no materials in it. If your template contains the figure, delete it and then in Model Info>Statistics, click Purge Unused.

There’s a couple of ways to get the materials into SketchUp. I prefer File>Import, importing with Use as Texture selected and apply the textures to rectangles drawn to the correct size for the textures. You can also click on New Texture in the Color drop down list in the Colors panel, select the image, edit its dimensions… That might be faster in this case.

After you have the materials in the In Model colors and all sized correctly, Click on Duplicate in the List drop down. Give it an appropriate name and click OK. After that, you should find that collection of materials in the drop down list at the top of the Colors window.

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make your window small enough to see the Finder window with the images showing in icon view…

drag and drop images onto pre-made faces…

select all and explode at the end, then save out the ‘in model’ collection…

just ‘undo’ when you mess one up [like I did on the second one]…

john

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great - thanks John and Dave… i am going to try these both!

I always run the whole folder through ‘ImageOptim.app’ first…

it’s amazing how much it can reduce the file size without downgrading the image…

john