Tile laying project

Hi all, I getting crazy on how to manage a Tile laying project in SketchUp.
Of course I use texture in order to have tiles on a surface, and it works great: I redefine my tile with borders in Photoshop, export it as a .png, and import this .png into SketchUp materials.

But… how should I work when I want to have a not so regular Tile laying on my floor?
I attach an image to let you better understand.


Should I still first use Photoshop, calculate how big the texture is and import into SketchUp? Or is there a better way?

I haven’t tried these but there is a free trial…Here

There also FloorGenerator
by sdmitch (free) which has the option to move the Texture applied to each pattern face in a random direction. Specific to the Wood pattern option is Fixed Length and Fixed Width. When checked, all full boards will be the length entered and all boards will be the width entered. When unchecked, both the length and width of each “row” will be random.

Seems interesting. But I was looking for a less “heavy” solution, I mean… all that lines give more precision, but what if I want to texturize my tiles, so that I can easily copy and paste inside another model?

To me it seems I should:

  1. Do the geometric Tile laying project inside Sketchup,
  2. Export the lines as image and open it in Photoshop, put a texture under the lines, export as an image (lines+texture).
  3. Import the image into Sketchup and give it the proper dimensions so that I have a scaled texture

I use only for DYI projects but coulple comments:
Typically one wants to avoid small cuts on each top, bottom and each side as show in your layout and the pics below;
Secondly if you have a very log run you need to account for the grout line when you make those layouts so things are " even" at those locations. Cutting " slivers" of tiles is not fun;
I then use an EXCEL spread sheet to get a layout meeting my criteria. However I have not tried a truly random layout. If that was goal I wound use the random number generator in EXCEL or use the SU plugin “component spray” to try.
BTW to my eye your lay out does not look random to me?
In addition some tiles try for that random look , the ones which are sheets and use small blocks maybe candidates unless you want the large size as shown.
Just some thoughts?
Could not find component spray in extension ware house still in Sketchucation but ??

Is this a real application or is just a virtual type of thing?
If this is areal build and not virtual model second thought is create your layout, select a available tile size (s), lay out your Normal distribution on the tile and then paint it. It is probably possible to then have tiles fired and glazed to what you design is. I hesitate to think you would want to cut out via CNC.
If you want to texturize and use in other model you should have info to do that?
I do not recall seeing any plugin to draw a normal curve but it is straight forward and the points colud easily be created in EXCEL ( That is what I guess you are showing in the PIC in your OP?

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