GETTING STARTED with SketchUp Free - Lesson 4 - Working with Materials in the Online Version

whoo what's up guys Justin here with the sketch essentials come back with another sketch up free tutorial for you so in today's video I'm gonna teach you how to work with materials inside of the free online version of Sketchup so let's go ahead and just jump into it so this video is a continuation of my getting started with Sketchup freeze series I will link to the entire playlist of Sketchup free videos in the notes down below so that you can follow along with them beginning if you'd like to in this video we're gonna talk about how to apply materials and some of the different things that you need to know when working with materials inside of Sketchup free and so to start off you can find materials by going over to this button right here this says materials well if that's going to do is that's gonna pop up a little window that allows you to select and edit the materials inside of your model so it's gonna look something like this if you have materials in your model this will look a little bit different but basically what this window allows you to do is it allows you to if you click on the little house it allows you to see the materials contained inside different things in your model and then on the right hand side it allows you to access the material library contained inside of Sketchup free so we'll talk a little bit more about this in a second but let's finish going through this this button will purge the unused materials meaning if you have a whole bunch of materials you're not using anymore it'll remove them from the in model section and you can also adjust the way you see these materials so as a general rule I pretty much always use the thumbnail view but you can kind of do whatever you want but start off let's talk a little bit about how to apply different materials inside of Sketchup so in Sketchup every one of these objects is a face and so if you click on the face and you go up into the entity info so that's going to be right here at the top of the page you can see how each one of these faces has a front side and a back side and each one of those has a material listed in this situation all of the materials that are all of the faces that I have in this model have the default material applied which is just this black anger or this white and gray color and so the back material is darker because that's the side of the face the front material is lighter but those are both the default material and I'm not going to get too far into the front and back side of faces just note that faces inside of Sketchup do have a front side and a back side but in this situation let's say that I wanted to apply a material to my ground right here well what I could do is I could browse and I can go down to colors and I could apply let's say like a green color to my ground so I could come in here and I could apply a green color to this ground and so there's two kinds of materials inside of Sketchup free there's colors and then there's textures so what we've done here is we've applied a color to the ground right here we could also come in and maybe apply like a gray material to our roof you can see how you can click on a material and then click on a face or an object in order to apply that material and it looks like my ground inside of my house is also turning green which I don't necessarily want so what I'm going to do real quick is I'm just going to cut this material out and so because we have two different kinds of materials in here you can either apply a color or you can apply a texture so in this situation let's say instead of having a green color in here with no image associated with it we were to come in here and click on the button for landscaping fencing and vegetation and as we scroll down you're gonna notice that there's actually materials in here for things like grass so if I was to click on grass and click on the ground right here you're gonna notice that what this does is this actually applies an image of grass to this face so while this is just a color this has a repeating image covering the ground that basically allows me to use a photo as a material and so as a general rule these are gonna be more realistic than just applying colors but you can apply either one of those inside of your model so in this situation I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna apply this material right here as well and so one thing to point out is now if I was to come in here and I was to click on this face and look at the entity info you're gonna see that this face has grass dark green material associated with the front face so there's nothing applied to the back face so if I was to rotate down you can see how there's nothing on this face right here it's all been applied to this face right here if you ever want to take something back to the default material so if you want to get rid of a material that's applied to this you can just going to be in any info after selecting your object you can click on the little X right here and it's gonna ask if I want to assign the default material to the selected entities and I'm gonna go ahead and say yes so you can see how when I do that you can use that to remove materials as well as add them so I'm gonna go ahead and put this grass material back right here and let's go through and add some more materials so one thing I want to point out is not only do these materials have the option of having a color or an image associated with them so the images the tiled image and that's going to be your textures they also have some other settings you can adjust so let's say for example that we wanted to edit this window what I've done is I've modeled this so that the the grey on the outside which would be at the aluminum would be on the outside and then I have a raw face on the inside that isn't grouped that's going to make up my glass material and so if I was to click on this button right here and scroll down and look at the glass and mirrors what you're gonna notice is if I was to apply the glass and mirror material in here you can see I can actually see through this and so the reason I can see through this is because this material is translucent meaning it allows light through the material so if I was to rotate into this house you can see how this material right here allows me to see through this out this window so you can apply these transparent materials to faces you can find some of them in the glass mirror the glass and mirrors section but you can also go into your colors and let's say I wanted something has maybe a little bit more of a we'll say like this lighter purple tinge or something like that I could apply this material to this face but then I can edit that too transparency or translucency to this material so the way that would work is if I was to click on the in model section and I was to go find this color right here so it's gonna be this color right here and click on it so this is the list of the materials in your model and I went and found the purple material that's in there I can click on this button right here to edit that material when I edit that material I can change things like the name of the material the color of the material or the opacity of the material so notice if I was to drag this down and rotate around and you kind of need to save the settings in order for this to work but let's say I give this an opacity of 35% and then I clicked on done what that would do is that would save the change to this material well now this material is a transparent material and I can actually see through it so you can actually create transparent materials in this way so another thing I want to talk about really quick is I want to talk about the way that materials are applied to raw faces as opposed to the way they're applied to groups so right now for example what we did before is our ground if you click on it you can see how this face is selected meaning the actual face geometry inside of my model is selected but we talked in the last video about how to group geometry so for example if I click on this house right here you can see how I get this blue box around it well the reason I have this blue box around it is because this is all grouped geometry what that means is if I was double-click in here and then click on a face you can see how all of this individual geometry has been placed in a group well that's going to affect the way that our materials are going to look so let's say for example that we wanted to add like a siding to the outside of our house well if I was to double click in here and just click and just apply a material to one of these faces so if I was to for example click on will go with this siding material right here for now and I was to click on this face you can see how this applies this material to one face at time right so I could go through and I could add a material to each one of these phases just by clicking on them however there's a faster way to do this which is if you have a group of geometry like this and you apply the material to the outside of the group you can see how everything in the group gets the material applied to it so instead of me going through and applying this material to every single face what I did is I just applied this to the outside of the group and if we were to look at our entity info notice that when I click on this it tells me that I have a group in the model selected and it has a material applied to it so you can either do this by applying materials to the outside of groups as a whole or individually now the problem with this you need to pay attention to is notice that the for for example was inside of this group and so what's happened is this siding material has now been applied to the inside of all of my objects as well which we don't necessarily want so we wouldn't have siding on the inside of our house so this can be very powerful but you need to be a little bit careful so I'm just gonna take this back to the default model and in this situation we're just gonna apply this to the individual faces however now I'll show you an example of a time when you would want to apply it to the outside of the group and so that's gonna be my window so if you remember my window has a raw face right here then it also has all of this geometry on the outside in a group so you can see how if I was to double click again I could get in here and adjust the raw geometry but I don't want that I want to be on the outside of this group right here well now what I can do is I can go through and I can find a gray color like this one or maybe this one and apply it to the outside of this group and it'll get applied to everything in this group so instead of me having to go through and select all these different faces and apply this to these individually I can just apply it to the outside of this overall group and so another thing I want to point out is when you do place materials on faces like this one on raw faces you can adjust the way those material sit on those faces so the way that would work is let's say I wanted to add a roof to this object so I wanted to add a roof like shingle material or something like that like it click on the roofing tab and I can click on this and I can apply a material to the roof right just by clicking on this face well let's say I wanted this roof material to be a little bit bigger well there's two different ways that you can do that so the first is you could click on this button right here for in model and you could edit this material and for something that has a texture applied to it I can actually adjust the width and the height of the texture that's been applied right here so let's say for example I wanted these to be a little bit bigger well I could just tell this I want this image to tile tile B's as if they were 4 foot by 4 foot instead of 3 foot by 3 foot so you can see how I can come in here and I can adjust that and the size of my material is going to adjust as well and so notice that right now this little this little chain is shown as unbroken what that means is this maintains the aspect ratio of the image because if I was to for example unlock this and then I was to change my width to something like 10 feet but I was to leave the other one at 5 feet you can see how this distorts my image by stretching it and so by leaving that locked you can set this to maintain these so that you don't get any kind of distortion in here and so once I've done that I can select that material from in model and I can apply it to my roof over here as well and so the other thing that we can also do with this is if you apply a material to a raw face so let's say for example that we were to go into our landscaping fencing and vegetation there's a couple different fencing objects that you can place in here so for example this object will place a fence on this face so it has transparency built into the image so you could also do something like this ruff would just like this or maybe this gate material so this is probably the best example of this so when I apply this material to this face you can see how I'm getting tiling in here well the reason I'm getting tiling in here is because the image isn't tall enough to fit on this face so what's happening is this places this image inside of this object but then it also tiles it because it repeats it because this is a repeating image on this face well what we can do is we can click on this raw face and note this only works on raw faces this isn't gonna work on geometry that's inside of a group but what you can do is you can right click on this material if you scroll down you can see how there's gonna be an option for position texture so what I can do is I can use Sketchup texture positioning tools in order to position this object on this face and notice when you do this what this does is pops up these four little pushpins what these push pins are as these are pins that allow you to adjust where your material sits so in this situation for example I can click and drag this in order to place this texture somewhere else on this face and you can also move the pins so for example I can single click on a pin to pick it up and move it and I could place that somewhere else so I could place that on this point right here I could place that on this point right here but what this red one does is it allows me to move my texture so I want to pick this at the lower left hand corner point and drag this over so that it aligns at the bottom corner of my model and then we're not gonna focus too much on these two right now we're gonna focus on this green one what the green one does is this allows me to resize or rescale my texture so you can see how when I do this I can use this to resize this so this texture actually fits on this face so now if I was to right-click and click on the button for done you can see how now this texture fits nicely this face so now we're gonna go find that material and we're gonna apply it to this face as well we're gonna have to do the same thing so we're just gonna have to come in here to right-click on this position our texture and click and drag this over here and I think actually I'm gonna go ahead and size this properly and click on done but then I'm gonna right click on this and I'm gonna click the button for make unique texture so when I do that what you're going to notice is this actually creates a copy of this texture right here so it takes the texture that we've adjusted and it creates it it creates it as its own texture inside of Sketchup so separate from the one that we had in here before well now if I apply this one you can see how it matches a lot better along the height of this face so while this one is our old texture we can click on that you can see how the sizing is not right if we click on our new one that got created in here you can see how the sizing is correct so you can see how that material works a whole lot better with this fence and so the last thing I want to talk about is you can also by creating a unique texture you can have art you can actually create your own textures using images from your computer so the way you can do this is I'm going to go ahead and pick a color it doesn't really matter which one in this case and I'm just going to apply it to this face well then I'm gonna click on it and I'm gonna edit this material well when I edit this material what I can do is you're gonna notice there's a little button right here for texture where you can click on this button and you can drag an image in of a texture that you want to use so in this situation I have a concrete material that I'm going to drag in here so I'm just going to take this material drag it over and place it right here and you can click on the button for use image well what that's going to do so that's gonna upload your image into Sketchup and it's gonna add it to your material library and some now if you edit this material well first if you look at this material you can see how it's actually tiling the image that I brought in here and so in this situation what I'm gonna do I'm gonna make this a lot bigger so I'm just gonna adjust this so that maybe it has like a 5 foot width associated with it and notice that the bigger these image files are the longer this is going to take to load so for example because this is a larger more high-resolution image file this takes longer to run in my web browser so that is something to be aware of is don't upload super high resolution images in this situation but I'm gonna go ahead and set this to 10 feet I'm just going to tap the tab key and this is going to automatically adjust the size and then I'm gonna click on done and so you can also by clicking on the edit button right here you can also adjust the color of this a little bit you have to be a little careful with this but if you click on this colorize button you can see how you're gonna be able to actually adjust the color of the material using your color picker so if you want this to be a little lighter or a little more grey or something like that you can use the color picker in order to do that so that should give you a pretty good idea of the way the materials work inside of Sketchup free but leave a comment below let me know what you thought did you know all this was in here have you been using this tool I just love having that conversation with you guys if you like this video please remember to click that like button down below if you're new around here remember to click that subscribe button for new Sketchup content every week if you like I'm doing this channel please consider supporting me on patreon every little bit helps even if it's only a dollar a month so make sure you check out that link in the notes down below but in any case thank you so much for taking the time to watch this I really appreciate it I will catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: TheSketchUpEssentials

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Keywords: thesketchupessentials, the sketchup essentials, thesketchupessentials.com, sketchup tutorials, sketchup lessons, sketchup modeling, sketchup 2018, architecture, sketchup 2017, sketchup tutorial, justin geis, sketchup, sketchup free, sketchup online version, sketchup online, sketchup free materials, sketchup free tutorials, sketchup free for beginners, sketchup free online tutorial, sketchup free beginner tutorial

Id: kF3K2Th0IR0

Length: 18min 47sec (1127 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 17 2020