Hi all, Im an interior designer and sketchup novice! I am working on an interior model and am having troubles putting a texture on to my component cupboards. I have download a wood grain texture from sketchup texture club to paint the faces of my cabinets. I understand that the texture needs to be applied to a FACE as I’ve tried painting the entire component only to have the texture mapping incorrectly. I am wondering if there is an easy way to do this? I seem to have to click my mouse a million and one times to get to the actual face that needs the texture. I apply the texture to the face and then reposition and resize to get the desired effect. I then try to use they eye dropper tool to pick up the same texture but the eye dropper only picks up a single colour of the wood grain. (eye dropper appears as a large circle!) If I highlight the face with the texture to save as a unique texture, it saves the texture with the light blue shading (showing its selected) on top of the wood grain. Is there a simple way to do this? Do I need to explode the components? Is there an easier way to select all of the faces of a bank of cabinetry instead of individually and clicking my mouse like a maniac?
note - components form Sketchthis.
Thanks!
also happy to share file if someone walks me through that as well haha
If you have to do lots of double clicking it means you have lots of nesting, groups within groups. Make sure you aren’t overdoing the wrapping.
The colour picker/materials editor is different from win to mac so I can’t be specific, but there are two different eyedroppers in window, one selects the material the other selects the pixel, sounds like you are using the pixel one. A mac user can advise you on that.
Attach your model by using the upload icon at the top of the message window when you are writing your reply, or drag and drop it into the message window. Assuming it is small enough, less than around 10mb. If bigger upload to dropbox or similar and paste the link into your message.
Thanks Box, hoping the link works.
You are right I have a bunch of groups within groups in the cabinet components.
And yep right again there are two different eye droppers - I’ve just found the correct one so thank you!
If you are able to open the file, you will see a bank of upper cabinets all with a teak woodgrain applied in 3 different ways! not what i’d like.
I really appreciate your help with this. As I said, Im a novice. Eager to learn!!
Those cabinets are Dynamic Components, which opens a whole different kettle of fish. They have built in materials which make it difficult to apply or adjust them manually.
ok thanks for having a look!
Just looking in your in model list in the component browser, the majority of components in your model are Dynamic. They can be very useful when you know how to work with them, but they add another level of difficulty when learning.
I personally use them rarely and as such can not offer much insight. There are others here that know their way around them.
On a different note, all the blue faces in in your model are the Back faces and shouldn’t be seen in the model. They will cause issue latter with thing like rendering, many render engines ignore back faces even when they have materials on them.
And your Tags are a bit messed up, a good example is the section you have as Exterior Walls. You have Tagged the raw geometry, you should leave all raw geometry as Untagged and only assign Tags to Groups, Components, Dimensions etc
Oh wow thank you so much! I really appreciate your help!
a few questions:
How can you tell the blue cabinetry are the back faces? I wonder how I’ve done this while using components from a plug in?
Also, How about the tags? (here I was proud that it looked so organised haha)… I still struggle with the difference between tags and outliner. Is there a good resource for learning how to organise a model properly? And can I fix the mistakes I’ve made and put the raw geometry back on…??
I feel silly with all these questions around the pros but if I don’t ask I won’t learn!!
many thanks again for your time
I didn’t mean the blue cupboards, I was referring to other parts of the model, the exterior walls in particular. The default colour of faces in sketchup is white on the front and a pale blue gray on the back.
ok great thank you! and how did you know that the raw geometry had been tagged?
I clicked on it and read it in entity info. You’ll see that if yo click on a single face it will show the tag as external walls, but if you triple click it will select all the mass of connected geometry and show nothing in the Tag section of the entity info dialog. This means that there is more than one tag assigned to all that geometry.
you have been soo helpful thank you!!!
Im self taught obviously! would like to become more proficient. how did you learn? best resources??thanks!
The SketchUp Campus at learn.sketchup.com is an excellent and free place to start.
There is also a free video series at which covers some of the same ground but differently.
Some older YouTube videos aren’t worth watching, and may be misleading.
I have just remembered another very good recent series by the Sketchup Team.
Search for ‘sketchup square one series’ (without the quotes).
Even experts can learn new things from these clear expositions of both the basic and the less obvious features of the SU tools, using them with different modifier keys, or in unexpected ways.
Thanks for this! I am watching now. I thought I was comfortable with all of the basics but am still struggling with tags and outliner and am sure this will pop up if I systematically watch each video!
have just finished one about condoc MOGs but think id better stick to learning proper model organising first!
Simple things to remember about Tags.
ALWAYS leave the default tag (the position of the little pencil icon in the Tags window) at Untagged.
NEVER* apply a tag to ‘raw geometry’ (edges and faces) but ONLY to components, groups, and non-geometrical objects such as dimensions and text.
Tags ONLY control object visibility. They do NOT separate one piece of geometry from another. That’s the role of components and groups.
Outliner presents a hierarchical view of the objects in your model - components, groups, and sections. Leaving it open in a complex model can (at least in earlier versions of SU, and to a lesser degree in the current version) drastically slow down the model.
It’s a good way to search for objects currently in your model. (But not for components that aren’t currently in use.) And once having found an object in Outliner, you can select it to highlight the object in the model, or even right click and Zoom Selection to change the model view to bring the whole object into the model window view.
…
- Note: Well, hardly ever. Not at all until you know what you are doing and why you might occasionally want to do that.
Thank you so much John! In my model I must have forgotten to group my exterior walls before tagging them. That would mean I’ve tagged the RAW Geometry! Your explanation will stay with me for my Sketchup life. Thanks for simplifying it all so nicely.
Another good habit to get into is immediately to make a component of each object as soon as you’ve drawn it. Leave no loose/raw geometry in the model except while drawing a new object.
Give the new component a meaningful name, and if it is useful, set the component axes. I find Groups (which are a special case of components) less useful than Components, so almost never make groups. And it’s harder to give a group a name, though you give each group an instance name via Entity Info.
The default component axis origin is the minimum x, y and z coordinates in the object, and is often fine (the bottom left hand corner in the default view with the red (x) axis running to the right on screen, the green (y) axis running into the screen away from you, and the blue (z) axis running up the screen.
The axes by default are parallel to the model axes. You can reset the axis location and direction during component creation, or change them later using R-click/Change axes. It’s a good deal harder to change a group’s axes.
But sometimes it’s better to use a different component origin and/or axis direction. For circular or part circular objects the circle or arc centre may be more useful. For a symmetrical object, a midpoint or central point may be more useful.
For a long thin piece, it’s often a good idea to set the longest direction as the red (x) axis.
Enough for you to absorb…
Wow all of that was helpful thank you. I surprised to hear you mainly use components! I have been making groups most of the time. Id thought components were only used when wanting Multiples of the same object so that changes could me made across them all at once. I do find it a pain to name groups as well. I will try components out and do some more research into axis origin. Cant thank you enough for your time and explanations. much appreciated. Is there any down side of using components over groups?
thanks
miranda
There are one or two, in some people’s view. But several upsides which in my view usually outweigh the downsides.
Advantages of of groups:
- A group doesn’t appear in the Component Browser, keeping it clear of what some regard as clutter. (But they do appear in Outliner).
- If you edit a group, it does NOT change any copies of it. That can be a plus, sometimes.
Disadvantages of groups
- If you delete the only copy of a group in your model, it’s gone. You would have to re-draw it to replace it. Whereas a component is stored in the Component Browser, even if there are no instances in the model, so you can reinsert an instance from the component browser into the model. (But remember to Purge your model from time to time to remove components you don’t want to keep in the model.)
- It’s harder to give a group a name - you have to remember to do so using Entity Info. So your Outliner may just show one group after another all unhelpfully named Group. By contrast, you are prompted for a Name every time you create a component. Give it a meaningful name at the time, otherwise you have nearly the same issue in Outliner - one component after another, distinguished only by a numeric suffix - Component#1, Component#2, … ,Component#43.
- It’s easy to change the axes of a component - R-click, Change axes. It’s a good deal more difficult to change a group’s axes - and I can’t even remember how to do it!
- A component can have additional properties that a group can’t have - including Glue to… and Cut opening properties
- If you have multiple copies of a component in your model, you can edit one and change them all at once.
- And if you want to change only some of the multiple copies, you can select them, R-click and Make Unique, then edit any one of the ones you want to change, to change all the selected ones.
- You can use the Component Browser to replace any selected component(s) with a different one.
Thats answered a lot thank you. One more question:
Does having a lot of components stored in the component browser slow a model more than having a lot of groups?
thanks