What's happening ladies and gentlemen, this is Minh from Architecture inspirations. Today I'm gonna show you some tips and tricks for Sketchup Materials and also some basics of Vray Materials. Here's a list of what I'm going to cover in this video, I will also provide timestamps for each section in the description box below, so you can skip to any section you want. With that said, Let's get started Number One, Applying materials To start applying materials, you need to use the Paint Bucket tool. Now if you're new to Sketchup, your setup might look a little different from mine You might have the tools in different places, but don't worry about that. Just look for this icon, or you can simply Press B for the Paint Bucket. Your cursor will then change to a paint bucket, and the materials window will pop up. This window has a library of materials that is included when you first installed Sketchup, From here you can select whichever material you like and click on a face or a group to paint it. Number Two, Painting Groups/Components vs Faces When you create a new element in Sketchup, it will have a default material, which is white for the front face, and bluish purple for the back. Painting a specific material to a face or faces will override that default material. Also note that the default material can be selected here if needed. When you have a group or component and you are painting it from the outside, all of the faces assigned with the default material will change. However if you edit it, you can change the material of a specific face within that group. Now if you exit the edit mode, you can still change the group's default material but any faces that are not assigned the default material will stay the way it is. I've mentioned groups and components, so what's the difference between them? Well, I'm going to explain this by telling you a story This is Steve and his twin brother Jeff my name Jeff and their last name is Green. And this is Bryan and his twin brother Blake Cooper The difference between these two families is that the Coopers are telepathic. Even though Steve and Jeff are pretty tight bros, they don't have that connection. So when Steve changes his shirt, Jeff DOESN'T do the same. But on the other hand, Bryan and Blake have that super power so they know what each other are thinking, so when Blake changes his shirt, Bryan does the same, now They have a connection Since The Greens are groups, and the Coopers are components. This means that making changes to a group will NOT affect its copies. On the other hand, any changes you make INSIDE a component will affect all other instances of that component However, any changes outside of it will not affect its copies. In some cases, you want to create unique copies of a component and stop it from linking to the original. If so then you can select the one that you'd like to make unique, right click it, then click Make Unique. Now you can edit this component without affecting the original or vice versa. This also works on multiple copies of that component. For instance, I can make these two cars Unique, so that they still link to each other, but not to the originals. Number Three, Creating a material To create a new material, first bring up the material window, then click on this icon right here. When you click this icon, a new window will pop up, and you can choose a color using the Color Picker here. If you want to use a texture, then check this box, now you can locate and select the texture that you want to use. You can also change the width and height of the texture here. And the opacity of it here. Number Four, Editing a Material You can edit any existing material in the model by first selecting the material that you want to change, and then go to edit mode. Like the creating material window, his has the same options where you can choose the color, texture, and change its width, height and opacity to whatever you like. The only differences between the edit mode and create mode are these two buttons right here. One lets you sample the color on an object, and the other lets you sample any color on screen. So if I want these windows to have this green background color or this sky blue color for example, then I can easily do so by using the two buttons. Number Five, Importing Sketchup Materials If you don't want to deal with sketchup's crappy default materials, then here are some ways to import your own materials. In a sense, Importing materials is a faster way of creating material Method number one: The Import First, Go to file, Import Then select the texture/material that you want Next, left Click on a corner of a surface to pick the anchor point and Move the mouse to size it, Finally, left click again to finish Method number two: The Drag and drop If you drag and drop a texture into Sketchup, it will come in as an image. What this means is that you cannot do anything to it except move, scale, and rotate it. See how I'm trying to sample the paint but Sketchup doesn't let me. If you want to use it as a texture, then just right click, explode, and now you can sample and use it to paint your geometries. Method number three: The Copy and paste Another way is to copy and paste a geometry With the material from another model For example I have a reference model on the left side, and my new model on the right. I can simply copy and paste the geometry with the material I want from one window to another And now I can sample paint from there. Number Six, Importing Vray Materials To import Vray materials to sketchup; first, press the M button on the Vray Toolbar to bring up Vray Material Editor. Note that the Vray toolbar can be found here if it is not on your setup already. Once you have the material editor opened, Right click the Scene Materials, Load material and just locate and select vismats or vrmats files. Once done, just select the material from the list and start painting away. If you select the material and click here, you can preview how the material will look once it's rendered I'm going to bring up the paint bucket and test it out. Well that's odd it shows up black on the model space but it looks fine once rendered. This is actually a small glitch that happens sometimes when Vray cannot locate the source of the texture. If you just reload the texture file like so, it will show up correctly in Sketchup. Also, if you want to create your own Vray materials, then this window is where you can do that. I am not going to go over it today, because that's a lengthy subject. Also there are so many resources out there where you can get free vray materials. Why spend time making something when you can just get it for free Number Seven, Materials Resources Speaking of free stuff, here are some resources for Sketchup and Vray Materials. You can pause the video right now and check them out or go to the links in the description box below We're more than half way through the video so I'm gonna get some water, meanwhile, enjoy this time-lapse! Welcome back! Number Eight, Applying materials to Curved surfaces Applying a texture to a curved surface is a little trickier than it is to a normal surface Curved surfaces in sketchup are composed of many straight surfaces. What does that mean? For example, when you draw a circle, you can actually see that it's made of many smaller segments. So when it's extruded the circle becomes a cylinder that is made of smaller faces. That's why sometimes when you import a 3D model to sketchup, it might have a ton of unnecessary lines which make it difficult and time-consuming to apply material to the object. Not only that, it might affect the final results once rendered. If you want to apply material to curved faces with hard edges like this, you can first select all of the geometries right click, soften edges, adjust the values a little, and now you have a cleaner object that you can easily apply material to. Number Nine, Repositioning Textures Sometimes when you import or paint a texture, it might not be at the right size or in the position that you want, here's how to resize and reposition it. Click on the face of the texture that you want to edit, right click and go to Texture->Position. Here, you will see 4 different pins. Click on a pin to lift and reposition it. Click and DRAG a pin will transform the texture in different ways. The Red pin is the anchor and will let you reposition the texture The Green pin is for Rotating and Scaling the texture proportionally The Blue pin will shear and scale the texture in the direction you drag it And the Yellow pin will distort the texture Also, Right clicking will give you options to rotate, flip and reset the texture. The fixed pins are very useful for applying a distorted texture to a surface. What do I mean by that? Let's say I want to apply this door material in this image to the object on the left, but it doesn't show up correctly because the picture was taken at an angle. To fix this, I first need to click on the material, go to texture, position. Now right click again and uncheck Fixed pins. Sketchup will now give you 4 generic yellow pins. What you need to do now is move these pins to each corner of the door texture. Now you can drag each pins to the corner of the geometry and boom, there you have it. Number Ten, Uisng Projected Textures Sometimes you may be dealing with surfaces that are more complex than a simple extrusion, and it might affect the way your texture show up Similar to this. If that's the case, then you should consider using this method to paint that geometry. First, create a surface that lines up with your curved surface Now apply the texture and make sure it's positioned correctly Right click and choose Texture-Projected Then sample the texture and paint the curved surface again Bam, fixed it. Number Eleven, Replacing Materials Let's say after you've applied materials to your the model, and you realized that it doesn't look as good as you thought it would. Now you're trying to figure out how to quickly replace all of these previously applied material without doing it one by one by one by one again Cause let's be honest here, ain't nobody got time for that sh*t. There are a couple of ways to paint multiple faces at once *Tip: make sure you do not have any faces selected when using these shortcuts Ctrl+Click All connected faces with matching paint will change This will change all adjacent faces Ctrl+Shift+Click All faces in the SAME OBJECT with matching paint will change This will paint all matching faces on the SAME OBJECT Shift+Click All faces in the ENTIRE model with matching paint will change This will paint all matching faces in the whole model Even though I said Shift+Click will paint all matching faces in the entire model, this guy over here doesn't change, why is that? It's because this object is a group so that the faces in there don't get affected Number Twelve, Matching material positions to multiple Faces Sometimes the positions of the same material don't match when it's applied to multiple faces. To match their positions, simply bring up the Paint bucket, then hold down Alt and left click to sample a face with correctly positioned texture. Once you sample the material, apply it to the other faces. You can also use the shortcuts from the previous tip to match material positions of multiple faces. Number Thirteen, Replacing Sketchup Material with Vray Material Usually when I apply materials to a model, I often use Sketchup materials from the start because it's more convenient. But sometimes Sketchup materials do not render as well as vray materials especially for glass materials such as this one. So when I want to use vray materials in their place, There's a very simple way to do that. First bring up the paint bucket tool and hold down Alt then left click the Sketchup material that you want to replace with Vray material. Then go to Vray material editor You will now see that material selected in the list. Now right click and import the Vray material that you want to use. You can then press the preview button to see what it will look like once it's rendered. Number Fourteen Applying a Material to a Layer Sometimes when you import a model to Sketchup, it might be organized by layers, like this model that I've imported from Revit. There's a trick that uses these layers as a way to apply materials to the model. Let's say I want to apply a wood material to this layer that consists of all the doors in the model, I can first go to the Vray material Editor, then select the material that I want to use, right click, apply material to layer, then select the Layer that I want and press OK. Uhh okay, well Sketchup crashed, let's try it again. What the **** Well, you know what, just don't use this tip, if you want to know how to efficiently apply materials to an imported model then just watch my last tutorial. Number Fifteen Style changes how you see materials No not stylee but Sketchup style If you don't have the Styles toolbar on your setup, it can be accessed through going to View Toolbars-Check the Styles box Wireframe This displays only the lines in the model. Hidden Line will display the model without any shading or textures Shade will shade faces to simulate a light source Shaded with Textures is pretty much Shaded but with textures Monochrome will display faces with the default front and back face color. And these two are toggles. X-Ray will make all faces transparent so you can see through your model Back Edges will displays edges that are hidden by other edges or faces Also if you want to change the default materials then you can go to style and change the color to anything you want, For example I can make the default color for the front face yellow and the back face even more purple. There's a lot more about styles, like how you customize them more by going to the Styles Window but I won't go into that today because this video is more about materials. And all you need to know is that Sketchup styles can change how materials are displayed in your model. So if the next time you open the model and see that all your textures are gone, don't freak out, just check and make sure that you have the right style turned on. And that's all I have for today's video, Like the video if you find it useful, and hit that subscribe button for more videos in the future. If you have any questions just let me know in the comment section below. I'll see you guys, next time.
Hi guys, recently I created a video on 15 useful tips that I know for Sketchup materials, hope this helps someone! Here's a list of what I covered:
Applying Materials
Painting Groups/Components vs Faces
Creating a Material
Editing a Material
Importing Sketchup Materials
Importing Vray Materials
Materials Resources
Applying materials to Curved surfaces
Repositioning Textures
Projected Textures
Replacing Materials
Matching Material Positions
Replacing Sketchup Material with Vray Material
Applying a Material to a Layer
Sketchup Styles
Great video! I've definitely learned some stuff I've never learned before. What rendering plug ins would you use for sketchup?
What is the plugin t hat gives you your bottom toolbar with stairs and grills etc? Great video btw!
This helped me a lot. Thank you! I also appreciate the tight editing and the humor is nice too. Thanks again man