Blueprint for Design

So recently I’ve been playing around in Sketch-up honing my skills in working from scratch to make models. And meet my science fiction fix. So I’ve been taking some of my sketches of space ships and modeling them to scale in sketch up. So today I’m going to focus on making texture maps within sketch-up to create them quickly.

First, texture maps are image files that get applied to the model as a “material” from the materials window using the paint pot tool. In sketch up there are solid colors, and photographs of landscaping, building materials, and other patterns. The computer applies these in a “tile” pattern on all of the surfaces of the model the tool is used to select.

Makes for the illusion of textured surfaces. curves can be a challenge!

First to make a custom texture map decide how big is the area this material needs to cover. For my ship model it is 300′ long and about 180′ wide at the end. So a large number of surfaces to cover. I want the effect of looking like armor platting. I decide I need a 50′x50′ area. If it’s smaller than that it will get “cluttered” looking, too large and it will be broken up too much. For a more down to Earth application, if you are putting a custom CMU block pattern, you would want a masonry module.

So in a new drawing I made a 50′x50′ rectangle. I then drew up several areas of  platting. I offset the outlines and then selected a gray-scale set of colors. Now I could use other colors but if you are looking for realism I suggest the gray-scale and then adjust the colors. (see below for these two ways).

Once I have the pattern established I next go to the “view” options. Turn off “display edges” and any edge options. Now the pattern is a bunch of unbounded colors. If I need a hard dark or light line between two areas I “offset” and color that area darker.

Next under “view” turn on “fog” menu. From the Fog menu check “use Fog” then un-check “use background color. There is a little square next to that which indicates what color is going to be used for the color of the “fog”. Click on it and select the color of the material you want, adjust the darkness using the slider. Press OK, and back in the “fog” menu there is a slider that has two settings one end has an ∞ symbol. where you put the “100%” will place the distance Sketch-up’s camera can “see” in the drawing. Move the “100%” to the right to adjust it so you have thicker fog. The slider on the left is the “thickness” of the fog. By doing this you can have a graduated color layered over the pattern. So with my drawing I wanted a yellowish-khaki look. (there is another method to do this in the materials menu discussed below)

To get this pattern into an image type you can use for a new materials it must be exported. First go to the “camera” menu and select “Top”. Then zoom extents. Now go to “file” menu and go to Export >2D graphics. Select a file type to export to. JPG is good for patterns, and pictures. GIF is useful if there is a transparent part of the material. You can adjust the output size and resolution from the Options button. smaller file size is better, it will make it render faster. Press OK and the file will out put the raster image.

Open the file with any photo/image adjusting software like GIMP or MS office Picture manager. Crop it so that it cuts out any extra area not in the pattern. A bleed area of a few pixels is not a bad idea either to avoid “lines” showing up unexpectedly.

50'x50' pattern area

Making the material is fairly strait forward. Open your model and go to the materials menu. press the “new material” option. This will open a new menu. there is a color wheel and a box to check “use image”. Next browse to the file you output. It will up load it. Next under neither are two boxes that have a vertical and horizontal sizes on one size and chain image on the other size. Set the size equal to the size of the original drawing. (in my example 50′x50′)

Other options here are “color correction” and “transparency”. Color correction is another way to adjust the color of the pattern. Click on the square and the color wheel will pop up, you can adjust it here too. If you want to restore the color to the default file values press “reset”. Now Transparency will adjust how translucent it is. This could be used for windows or if you want to do a cut-away of a model you can make a solid transparent.  Once you set it up press OK.

Then use the paint pot tool to apply the new material. Keep in mind that these materials have an orientation and components and grouped objects may have to have their orientation adjusted or opened for editing in the correct orientation to make the material look right.

So how did I get the Earth in there? It’s not Google Earth, that’s for sure. For this I did the same thing but in reverse. here’s how I made the scene.

First I downloaded a NASA image from the JPL photo gallery of public domain images. Then I cropped it to a square shape. Then uploaded it as a new material and sized it to 500′ x 500′. Then I made a 500′x500′ rectangle and added the new “Earth” material I just made. (note I had to flip the face of this rectangle so it would display correctly, I didn’t want Bizzaro-world Earth!) I positioned the ship model in front of the Earth image. I set the “Fog” setting to black and infinite cut-off distance.  To export I used the same method, but bumped up the resolution size.

Sketch-up is a great tool to play with, try this out it only took about 30 to 45 to go from scratch to painting the model.