Need advice on Texturing (SketchUp 7)
J.Stevenson
while creating a 3D building, I appear to lose the ability to Align
View and use the Texture -> Position tool. Tonight, it was as I was
building an Octagonal tower stucture. Basically, it's an octagon
extruded to a certain height. Then I scaled the top polygon down a
bit to give the tower a taper (it's a lighthouse structure). As soon
as I did this I found I could use the pick and paintbruch to apply a
texture. BUT, I'm unable to adjust the positioning which is REALLY
bad.
Any ideas on what I did wrong to render the texture->position tool
inoperative on the surfaces of this tower? I notice that the Align-
>View has also stopped working.
Help!
-J.Stevenson
SnowTiger
It is a bit hard for me to determine exactly what is going on, but I
have my suspicions.
As such, I will provided the following with hopes that something
strikes the right note.
There are at least 2 different ways to texture the surfaces you have
described (assuming that there are definitive lines that separate the
surfaces/Faces.
Where there are no lines visible, it can be helpful to turn the Hidden
Line Visibility ON.
If you have applied the texture using the Import Texture function,
then you have a choice of Fixed Pins or the Yellow Pins.
When working on surfaces that are anything but flat square/rectangular
shapes, I personally find the Yellow Pins work best for me which allow
you to move each corner of the image as necessary.
Alternately, you can Project your textures onto your surface(s). This
requires the image to be projected to be aligned with the surface you
wish to texture. The projected image (which is placed on a flat
surface from which you sample the image to project it) must also be
scaled properly so all the surface needing texture, receives texture.
Once this is done, if you still need to alter/modify the position of
the projected image, you will "sometimes" have to un-check "Projected"
in order for the Position feature to be available. Then you can
position it using the Yellow or Fixed pins again.
I don't know if this has helped you any, but if not, then I highly
recommend viewing any YouTube videos you can find on the topic. If you
can't find any, let us know, I have tons of links as I'm sure others
also do.
J.Stevenson
Thanks for the advice. How do I activate this "yellow pin" business.
All I've ever seen are the standard four pins in Texture->move (red,
green, yellow and blue for each of the distort functions).
Is the problem caused by the fact that where I had a set of orthogonal
surfaces after I extruded (i.e. it was just an octagonal prism) - when
I scaled the top surface, these became none-orrthogonal? The strange
this is, I've done this successfully before on a similar lighthouse
model.
I've uploaded my "Working Model" that contains the offending tower.
It's now in 3D Warehouse under the name:
"Fortis Building to Baird's Cove, St.John's, Newfoundland, CANADA"
Could you take a quick look at the partially textured tower of the
Neal Building (the brick structure at the NE end) and tell me why I
can't adjust the textures on the faces? As you can see, the default
paint effect is not good!
-Jon
matthiasbasler
> I've uploaded my "Working Model" that contains the offending tower.
> It's now in 3D Warehouse under the name:
>
> "Fortis Building to Baird's Cove, St.John's, Newfoundland, CANADA"
>
> Could you take a quick look at the partially textured tower of the
> Neal Building (the brick structure at the NE end) and tell me why I
> can't adjust the textures on the faces?
SnowTiger already mentioned it: Turn the hidden geometry on (via the
menu) and you'll see that some quadrangles are actually not planar,
but consist of two triangles that have been "glued together" via the
"Smooth edges" tool. Sometimes Sketchup does this automatically when
distorting faces.
Select such a face, right click, choose "Select surrounding edges",
right click again and choose "Smooth edges" (or some such). You can
then set the value to 0 and the two faces will dissolve again.
If I were you I would delete and rebuild these affected faces of the
model as they are likely not exactly modelled or this wouldn't have
happened.