Paint bucket material orientation

SketchUp
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This is a paint bucket question. I am a beginner in Make.

How do I orient materials so that wood grain runs the correct way? I have a three part railing. Two vertical members and an intermediate member at about 30 degrees to the horizontal. running the grain in the two vertical members is easy. The only way I have found to orient the grain properly for the intermediate members is to rotate the member, paint it, then re-orient it to the desired angle. Is there a better way?

Also in Paintbucket, I am unable to have the fixed pin markers show all the time. The fixed pin box is checked but when I drag the icons to orient the material, the icons tend to disappear.

Paul

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Once painted you can context click on the painted face and select ‘Texture’ > Position > and manipulate the pins > and finish with a right click > done.

The pins snap to edges and/or guides to help you. You can’t specify a value through the ‘Measurements’ field.
Guides (or edges) may help you to rotate an exact amount of degrees.

3

You’ll notice a “fixed pins” option. With that not checked you get what Wo3Dan was describing. The pins will be yellow, and it’s the fastest way to fix perspective issues. It’s not so great for simple rotations.

With Fixed Pins checked, you get red, green, blue, and yellow pins. The green pin is for rotating and scaling. It’s unfortunate that there isn’t one just for rotating, so as you drag the green pin watch out for the scale changing.

I had never noticed it before, mainly because I use the yellow pins most of the time, but when you are rotating with the green pin you will see a protractor. That has 15 degree notches in it, and the rotation will snap to those if you’re close to one. That makes it very easy to get exactly 90 degrees, or any multiple of 15.

Another thing I only just noticed, holding the shift key will toggle between fixed and non fixed pins. It is mentioned in the help text at the bottom of the window, but I hadn’t read that until now!

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Position Texture Tool — SketchUp help

1 Like
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You can also r-click or double click on one of the pins to toggle between fixed and 4 different “transformation” pins.

There are a few things to be aware of when trying to match textures and rotations:

  • If you are applying a texture to a group (so that every entity in the group with a “default” texture will fill with this texture), it will always orientate to the “default” direction. Only textures on surfaces can be rotated and scaled.

  • You can use the same texture with the same name, image, tint, transparency
 but just rotate/scale/transform it. This means that if you change any of the texture’s properties, everything filled with it will change.

  • If you use the pipette tool to lift a texture from a surface, then that texture’s rotation, scale, etc will be lifted too. However if you select the texture from the list of textures used in the model, it will have the default properties.

  • The orientation of textures when you are pasting them (if copied with the pipette tool) sometimes depends on the viewing angle of the face you are pasting. {I can’t explain it better than this, but if toy take a texture looking at the side of a piece of wood, try and look in roughly the same orientation when you use the paint bucket.}

  • The rotation angle of a texture is based on the master global origin; if your texture is so that it’s horizontal but your whole object is rotated then the copied texture will run horizontal on any face within the rotated object, no matter what it’s rotation.

  • Textures once applied will remain in that orientation (in relation to the bounding edges) - you can rotate/scale the face and the texture will rotate and scale with it. The resulting rotation/scaling can be taken with the pipette to be applied to other faces.

  • When you rotate a texture, the blue dotted line on the arc of rotation is 100% scale (it snaps to this); It’s very easy to scale a texture while rotating it by mistake.

  • If you use scale to stretch a surface, the texture will stretch with it - you can use the pipette tool to “copy” the surface, stretch the master object, then paint that texture back onto the surface again. If you use push/pull or move, then the surface will simply repeat.

Personally now I find it quicker and easier to use 2 identical textures, named “wood H” and “wood V” with the texture image rotated 90Âș: I can then fill groups with one click.