Sketchup Shorts #3: Going to the Lumberyard - Virtually

Out of curiosity, what does your birdseye maple material look like if you enlarge the box. say make it 4 time wider and taller.

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

it actually scales up with the piece. from my experience, this is how the rest of (default) materials behave…

I rarely use materials- I mostly use sketchup for roughing up and detailing dimensions and joinery my woodworking models are usually left unpainted (unfinished if you would). I do however paint models that I want to present to someone else, or models that are published.

out of curiosity – what do your materials look like when you scale the box?

-- When in doubt - There is no doubt - Go the safer route.

If you use the scale tool, you will scale the material too. Don’t use Scale. Just use Push/Pull. What I want to see is what your material looks like when it is smaller than the face it is painted on. Does it repeat nicely or does it look like squares of the same veneer?

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

I see your point, in this case, depending on the source image there might be some tile-effect to it, in this example, I did choose a source image that was somewhat clean and wouldn’t show much of the tile-effect when spread around a face that is larger than the original source image (I guess It’s a habit) but it would need some touchups in photoshop to make it tile-proof – but that is another tutorial for another time I guess :) but it is a good point.

here is the material spread across an large area – you can see the tile effect even though in this case its minimized:

and here it is slightly cleaned up:

but it still shows the repetition. do you birdseye maple material that presents a cleaner appearance? (you can always play with the scaling of the material, and positioning to get a better looking result)

-- When in doubt - There is no doubt - Go the safer route.

The crazier the grain, the harder it is to make realistic materials from it. The grain will neccessarily repeat and if you have something recognizable such as a knot, it will make the material look fake.

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

Ya tiling drives me crazy! You can find the nicest texture and then by the time you get it applied scaled and looking close to how you want it it looks fake because of tiling. Allot of the guys on the Podium forum are real good with photo shop and they make all their own seamless textures. I have read a few tutorials on how to apply a texture to a large surface and then make the seams go away but I’m not that handy with photo shop!

-- David, South Windsor, CT "I love the smell of sawdust in the morning"

I found a freeware application that doesn’t do too bad of a job automatically. I’ll have to see if I can find it and post a link or something.

Still, the really wild grain textures will never look good.

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

DaveR, I am still trying to get the hang of “Wood Workshop” .
What do you think of this program??

I tried it. Didn’t like it. I’d rather just use flat brown colors than the weird stuff I got out of Wood Workshop. Certainly not very realistic looking wood grain. Looks worse when rendered. You might make it do what you need, though.

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

I’ve made a few that look alright, but only alright, nothing great. I was thinking it’s more work than it’s worth. Hard to make a specific species, only make believe wood grain. lol
Thanks, I will keep looking.

You could make psuedo-wood grain contact paper. :D

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

Cool, now, if I could just get the blank contact paper into my printer…......:)
and a few more ink cartridges

Here you go.

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

LOL, thanks, but somehow I think my client may still see the tiling effect it would have. ;)

No need for a veneer press though. LOL

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

Thanks Dave, you just saved me a bunch-load of money on exotic lumber that I was going to shell out for… ;o)

it is true though about distinctive grain materials – the more distinctive the pattern in , the harder it is to hide the seams. in this case, it is much like woodworking – you have to custom make the materials for specific parts for best results, use a larger source image with more detail to cover a larger area, prepare custom made images in photoshop for each piece you work on etc. this is much like working in Maya for animation where (almost) every component uses a custom material with custom-made projected images (both for colors, patterns, and alpha channels – thats a ton of source images for materials for every project, but it pays off).

the original post was though to introduce people to the simple fact that it’s possible, and quite easy to use your very own materials that you can create in a few seconds – some will be seamless, some can be made seamless, and others – well, it is SKETCH up after all. we’re not trying to create a perfect world (we are , but for sake of argument lets say we’re not)

-- When in doubt - There is no doubt - Go the safer route.

Thanks, this is helpful.

-- Check out my new website! http://www.blakeweberwoodworking.com