Painting
For example, take a look at Figure 7.1, where you can see a cube of wood.
FIGURE 7.1 A cube
Or is it? It certainly doesn’t look like a cube of wood. Now take a look at Figure 7.2, where we’ve used the Paint tool (the tool with the paint bucket icon) and painted the block with a wood texture—if you can see the grain on the various faces, you can see that it looks a lot more like a block of wood.
FIGURE 7.2 A block of wood created using the Paint tool.
That’s what painting looks like in SketchUp. You don’t usually just paintcolors, you paint textures, too. SketchUp comes with a large selection of textures for you to paint with—everything from wood to brick.
TIP: Texture Aligns with Surfaces
In addition, it’s worth noting that the textures you paint align with the surface. That means, for example, that when you paint a surface to have a wood texture, the grain of the wood aligns with the surface.
Let’s get started.
Using the Paint Tool
In the first task for this lesson, we’ll see how to use the paint bucket at its simplest, just bringing it up and painting some surfaces.To get started with the Paint tool, follow these steps:
1. Start SketchUp. The Welcome to SketchUp dialog box appears. For this task, we’ll work with the Engineering–Feet template we’ve used in the previous lessons.
2. Click the Start Using SketchUp button.
3. Select the Rectangle tool.
4. Draw a horizontal rectangle.
5. Select the Push/Pull tool in the toolbar.
6. Pull the rectangle up into a cube.
7. Select the Paint tool in the toolbar (refer to Figure 7.2).
Selecting the Paint tool displays the materials browser, as shown in Figure 7.3.
The materials browser lets you select the material you want to paint with. By default, the materials browser will have a texture selected, such as brick.
8. Click all surfaces of the cube. This will paint all surfaces of the cube with the texture selected in the materials browser.
If you like, you can orbit and paint the back surfaces as well.
You can see the results in Figure 7.4, where the cube has been painted with brick texture.
That lets us get started with painting. But the default texture that SketchUp selected is probably not what you had in mind to paint that car or chair you’ve been drawing.
To see how to set your own textures, take a look at the next task.
FIGURE 7.3 The materials browser.
FIGURE 7.4 A brick cube.
Thanks :
Steven Holzner,
SamsTeachYourself Google SketchUp 8 in 10 Minutes
