4 Ways to Add Backgrounds to a SketchUp Model - The SketchUp Essentials #41

what's up guys Justin here with these gadget essentials calm back with another Sketchup essentials tutorial for you so today we're going to talk about a couple different ways to add background images to your models so let's go ahead and just jump into it alright so usually when you're you when you're going to use this as when you're trying to make a model look a little bit more realistic like for example I've got this house model that I downloaded from the 3d warehouse and I'm not sure if it's if I'm pronouncing it right but this is a house from Quebec it's Mason findell by rod Amato you can download that from the 3d warehouse but that's basically just a house that I downloaded as an example but a lot of the time what you're going to want is you're going to want something like an image from the front here you want to have a background if like sky or mountains or kind of a landscape in the background to give this a little bit more kind of geographical context that kind of thing and so on there's a couple different ways that you can do this and I just want to walk you through a few of them so the first and probably the easiest way to do this would be to just come in here and just on the back in the background of your image just like this or in the background of your model to come in here and basically draw a big face just like this so just come in here and draw a face and then what you're going to do is you're going to basically apply an image to that so I have a texture that I'm going to use it's basically just a sky and I'm going to use that as my example but basically I'm going to come in here and I'm going to find my image in this case I have my sky image I'm going to import it as a texture so select your image select texture and then click import and what that's going to allow you to do is that's going to allow you to come in here and add this image as a texture onto this face so that's probably the easiest way to do something like this it's just to come in here and and basically draw this sky in on a flat face just like this and so if you're just looking for like a single image just like this no other camera views or anything like this this is probably the simplest easiest way to do this so like I could come in here and I'm going to go ahead and make a seen out of this but basically you've got a house and you've got your sky in the background you could come in here and add some trees and other stuff to kind of blend this together a little bit but that's the quickest easiest way to do this the the issue with this is it's not very good for multiple camera angles so like if I come in here and I rotate my camera like pretty much at all you can see how this image only lasts to like the edges of my view right here so it's very limited so I'm basically limited I can't look up very high I mean I could make this wider and all of that definitely so like I could come in here and I could definitely like widen this image out and you'd probably have to do some like texture repositioning type stuff and that kind of thing but you could definitely do that but it's just not very good for kind of moving your image around I mean I can definitely come in here and adjust this using the position texture tools to make it bigger you know and that would allow me to kind of rotate around a little bit more but you can see how you're just it's it's basically good for one view so but if that's all you need then this is the easiest way to do this so the second way that you could do this is you could come in here and instead of doing it this way and I'm just going to kind of group these and hide them but instead of doing it that way if you want something that's always going to be behind your model what you can do is you can add a watermark so that's the second way to add a background to your model is to come into your styles and add a watermark and watermark is basically an image sketchup takes and it puts either in front of or behind your image no matter what your camera angle is so what you do is you'd come over here to your Style section in your tray and if you don't see your tray you go to window default tray and make sure show tray is checked also make sure this Styles box is checked that that ought to make this show up in here but what you're going to do is you're going to go it's probably going to show up and it's going to look something like this when you first get here so this is your active style and all that well what you're going to do is you're going to go to this edit tab and you're going to go to this fourth box which is watermark settings and you want to make sure this box is checked right here for display watermarks but what you can do is you can come down here to this plus sign you can click on that and you can add an image as a watermark so I can come in here and I can click Add or click OK with the image that I want first thing it's going to ask you is if you want this to be an overlay or a background in this case we want it to be a background so you can see how now this puts it behind all the geometry in our model now we're going to click Next and it'll allow you to kind of adjust how like transparent that image is so in this case we just want it to be all the way over here to image for right now and you can come back and adjust this later that's just going to adjust how this blends in here so we're going to click Next again and then it's going to give you separate several different options in here so it's going to give you options for how you want this displayed and we want to select this first box which is stretched to fit the screen and if you right now what this is going to do is this is going to lock in the aspect ratio of your image meaning it's going to put this image back here but it's not going to fill the whole screen because it's locking it's trying to not distort your image by stretching it in this case we're going to go ahead and uncheck that box and you can see how that may create a little bit of distortion but it also takes your image and puts it all the way across the background here minimum click finish and so now you can see what that does is no matter where I'm at in my model just like this it's going to put that image behind you or behind your model so you can come in here and you can adjust the way that you're looking at your house you can move it up and down that kind of thing and this is always going to be behind your image so you know that's definitely an option to come in here and add a sky or a background really fast is by doing something like that so you can definitely do that for me I find that it gets a little hard to kind of make this look natural depending on how you're doing this so I'm not the biggest fan doing it this way where I am a big fan of doing it this way though is when you're dealing with an interior model so and this is an interior model that I've downloaded from the 3d warehouse and this model is aerial it's just living room by soup dog so you can find that in the 3d warehouse but it's basically an interior model just like this so if I kind of look around it's basically just a modeled interior with kind of a hole in the end here for your camera but it's basically a living room in here with some windows and so where this is good is you can come in here and add this image as a watermark in the background and I've got gone ahead and added that but you can see how now you can kind of see that through your windows and I turn the ground plane on by coming over here and checking the box for ground and I turn the sky off but you can see how this is a really good way to come in here and just kind of add a sky or a background through your windows so this is good for interiors it's a real quick easy way to just kind of throw that watermark in the background and you can basically call it good from there you can see how you may have to adjust this up and down a little bit and all of that but it's a real quick way to get that background through your windows if you're dealing with an interior so the third way to do this is to come in here and model kind of a cylindrical background around your object so like for example if I was to come in here and I was to draw like a giant cylinder kind of like this and then push pull it up and delete the top out what that would do is that would create kind of basically this piece this panoramic piece of geometry right here that would basically surround my house model so you can see how if I come in here I kind of set my camera up and I look around what that's going to do is that's going to be all the way around my model well then what I can do is I can come in here and I can apply my sky material to it but that gets a little bit tricky and here's why so what you can do with this is you can bring your image in as a texture just like this but you kind of have to be careful the way that it comes in here because if you this in I'm using the import texture like we did before you can see how this only applies this to a single face and what you can do is you can use the eyedropper in your material section to select that material I'm going to apply it to the rest of your image but you can see how what that does is that's repeating that's repeating this texture but it's not repeating it it's repeating it too many times and so it doesn't look very realistic so and sometimes if you bring this in it'll also like if I triple click on this or example you can see how this this cylinder is basically made up of a whole bunch of flat faces sometimes it'll bring this in and it will just kind of tile this across your faces just like this and it won't look very realistic so what you end up having to do for something like this is I would come over here and I would draw a face as kind of like a canvas to work on my texture and then I would kind of make it kind of longer just like this and so I would take this face and I would apply this texture to that face just like this so kind of the same way import images texture click import and then you would click this across just like this so what you can do is you can use this canvas that you created to come in here kind of adjust your image like for example you can see if I make this wider just like this then it starts tiling this texture so what you can do is you can come in here to the texture edit so you can right click on this click texture and click position and you can adjust the size of your texture by dragging these little pins on this face so I could adjust this to kind of make it work then come in here and click done well then what I could do is I can right click on this on texture and I can click projected and when I select projected what that means is that's going to take this image and it's going to project it along this curved face just like this so and then what I can do is I can sample the material and then come over here and click on this and you can see how what that's doing is that's taking that sky image and it's kind of projecting it along the edge there and you can see how you're getting a little bit of distortion in here along the edges because basically it's taking this and it's projecting it along these faces all the way along here just like this so you have to be a little careful in the way that you do this so but basically what you can do now is you can come in here and this gives you a lot more options you're kind of like looking around um in this panorama and you do still have to be a little careful you can't come over here and look at this side because you've got a little bit of distortion but the sky is OK in the background and so the plus about this is if you come in here and you render this then what's going to happen is the background will still reflect off of these faces and all of that sort of looked pretty realistic and the other thing you have to be a little careful about is you have to make sure that you're kind of like base that your ground plane is big enough that you don't have any obvious gaps in here so all you really have to do with that if it's a texture is just come in here and just kind of make this a little bit bigger by moving these up moving these lines to kind of grow the thing just like this so you know just make sure those are big enough well then you can come in here and you can set up your camera view and you can see how this gives you a lot more options to kind of look around and that kind of thing and the other nice thing about this is you can also since we made that image so much bigger you can move this up on the blue axis to make it taller and it's just going to pick up the rest of that texture just like this and I think um in here and you can look around at your sky and all of that and I think it's just more realistic than having the flat piece on there as well so that's the third way to come in here and do this and then the fourth way to do this is to come in here I'm going to put these in a group and hide them the fourth way to do this is to come in here and add what's called a sky dome and so what a sky dome is it's basically a dome with the sky material applied to it that goes all the way over your model so if you go into the 3d warehouse and search your sky dome in this case I'm going to bring in I think this PJ sky dome is a good one but you can click on that and you can download that in your model so go ahead and click yes and give it a minute so you can just kind of place that over your model just like this and you can see how basically what that is is that's like a full on sky so it's like a 360-degree sky so you can see how it's all the way over my model well now if I kind of fly in here with my camera and this may take just a second but now if I fly in here with my camera and I look around like that gives me a sky all the way around my model just like this so if I look up their sky above my object their sky khon everywhere so this is probably the best way to get like the full 360-degree sky in here um I don't necessarily like this image so much you can come in here and you can select that material of the sky and kind of brighten it up using the color wheel just like this if you want kind of a brighter object but a brighter sky so that's probably the best way to get a sky all the way around your object to trick with that though is that require some kind of UV mapping because the texture doesn't necessarily map quite right with the default texture tools and Sketchup so it can be complicated to create those but there are several of them in the 3d warehouse you can download there's probably some others online I have a gun looking for them but you can definitely down those and bring those into your model as well so they all have a little bit of pluses a little bit of minuses but they all kind of give you a different set of options or what you want to do so that's where I'm at in today's video leave a comment below let me know what you thought did I forget anything have you been using any of this stuff I just love having that Sketchup conversation with you guys now if you like this video please remember to click that like button down below you're new around here remember to click that subscribe button for new Sketchup content every week if you like what I'm doing on my channel please consider visiting my support me page on my website that's the Sketchup essentials comm slash support and that's got everything from extensions you can purchase to support the shell to links to my patreon page but in any case thank you so much for taking the time to watch this I really appreciate it and I will catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: TheSketchUpEssentials

Views: 168,275

Rating: 4.9305859 out of 5

Keywords: thesketchupessentials, the sketchup essentials, thesketchupessentials.com, sketchup tutorials, sketchup lessons, sketchup modeling, sketchup 2016, architecture, sketchup 2017, sketchup background, sketchup backdrop, sketchup watermark, sketchup sky dome, sketchup add background, how to add background in sketchup, how to set background in sketchup, how to make background in sketchup, how to put background in sketchup, how to put sky background in sketchup, sketchup, sketchup sky

Id: ZQZOQtkJ1-w

Length: 15min 24sec (924 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 20 2017