Adding Some Materials

I’m still waiting for the decision about the drawer but I figured I might as well talk about applying the materials to the table. Let’s see if any of this makes a lick of sense.

Before we get started, I’m going to babble a little about applying materials in general. If you’ve read my diatribe about components, you know of my sandwich analogy. When you apply materials to components, and groups for that matter, you can apply it to the wrapper or to the faces inside the wrapper. If you apply it to the wrapper, you can’t edit it and your painting only affects the single component you’ve painted.

A few years ago, on a flight from Atlanta, I somehow got put in first class. It was a dinner flight and shortly after we took off, the flight attendant put salads in front of me and my neighbor. From the smell of things, my neighbor had been in an airport bar for a few drinks and he had two on the plane before we took off. I watched out of the corner of my eye as he pulled the cover off his ranch dressing and poured it on his salad. Something didn’t look quite right to him and he stared at his salad for about 30 seconds. I think he was sussing out just what was wrong. Turns out he had failed to remove the Saran wrap from over his salad. It was difficult to keep from spewing lettuce out my nose.

Every time I talk about applying materials in SketchUp I think of that gentleman.

I stripped the materials from the model and we’ll start from the beginning.

It doesn’t really matter where we start so I started on the drawer front. Of course I opened it for editing before applying the material to it. Then I opened the front apron component for editing, selected all of it (triple click with the Select tool) and applied the same material to it.

Notice that the grain of the two pieces doesn’t align. We’ll fix that right away. I opened the drawer front component, right clicked on the front face and chose Texture>Position. then I moved the texture so the bottom edge of it is aligned with the bottom edge of the drawer front. Then I opened the apron for editing and did the same. You can see dotted lines that represent the edges of a single copy of the material so this makes it fairly easy to do.

Next I opened one of the other apron components and painted it with the same material.

Now, the curved bottom edge of aprons need a little attention. Confession: there’s a continuity problem here because I really did this after painting the legs.

The first thing I did was unsoften the edges between the bottom of the apron and the bead. Perhaps the easiest way is to do this is to show hidden geometry (View menu) and just trace the edges that you want to have unhidden. You could also select the edges and right click and choose Unhide. in any case, after you’ve got the edges showing, turn off Hidden Geometry again.

Next I drew a rectangle below the table. I put it on the ground plane because that’s an easy place to do it. In this case the face needs to be horizontal. Then I painted it with the material. I selected the face only, right clicked and chose Texture>Projected.

Then I opened the apron for editing and got the eyedropper tool from the Materials browser. I sampled the material from the face on the ground plane and then clicked on the curved bottom face of the apron.

I did the same for the other aprons. The easiest thing is to edit the back apron since its alignment is the same as the front one. Then you can use the same face as your sample.

After completing the aprons, I moved on to the top. Before doing that I right clicked on the face on the ground plane and then unchecked Projected.

I opened the top component for editing. Then, because I want the top to look like it is veneered, I drew diagonals across the top. Then I painted the surfaces with the material. You could do this the other way around, too.

Next I selected the face on the left and right clicked. I chose Texture>Position. At this point one could drag the green handle to rotate the material but instead, I right clicked again and chose 90°.

I repeated that for the right side. I also moved the materials so the grain lined up around the top a little better.

I opened one of the trim components and added the cherry material to it. In this case the material lined up fine but if it hadn’t, I ‘d have created a vertical face to paint, adjusted the angle and then projected it to the trim as I did on the bottom of the aprons.

Then I applied the material to a leg component. As you can see, it isn’t aligned correctly.

Select a single face, right click, choose Texture>Position. Right click again and choose Rotate>90°. then get the Select tool, and triple click on the legs to select all of the goemetry. Get the eye dropper and sample the rotated texture. After sampling the texture, the tool turns into the paint bucket. Click again and the material is aligned all the way around.

Almost finished. One last detail. This is sort of an optional thing. I hid the edges between “veneers” and the exterior edges on the top component. I also hid the edges on the trim components which leaves us with this:

And there you have it.

We still have a few things to do and then we’ll figure out what we need to know to head off to the shop.

-- Until you spread your wings, you'll have no idea how far you can walk.