We will walk through the majority of steps necessary to complete our work within SketchUp together - however, much of the work will require creativity and imagination as well as trial and error in order to obtain the required design/shape. In order to help everyone throughout this process - I have posted some scripts and will post videos that will assist you in using SketchUp and it's many tools.

Apply Materials

Edit Materials

Create Materials

Map Textures Interactively

Map Curved Objects

Projection Maps on Curved Objects

Create a Floor Plan using Bitmaps

Draw a Structure from a Floor Plan

Script

Materials and Textures
 
 
Apply Materials

1. When you design something, color and texture of your object is very important.And in SketchUp we can work with color and texture by using what are called materials. Now the tools to do this are very different between Windows and OSX, or the Macintosh, so I'm going to go through the Windows tool kit first, and then in the next chapter, we'll go over all the Mac and OSX tools. So Windows users, go ahead and stick with me here. Macintosh users, if you want, you can feel free to skip over this chapter and start working on the next chapter.
2. OK, so in SketchUp, materials and color are managed through the Materials Editor. Now I have my Materials Editor here in my default tray. Now in this particular model I have no materials applied. If I hit this button here, which is the Home button, you'll see that actually nothing shows up. Now the Materials window is very similar to the Component window, we have two tabs here. One is for Select, one is for Edit.
3. So if I go over to Select, you can see here I've got this pull-down menu here, and this allows me to pull down and select any number of different types of materials. So if I were to say, go to Landscaping, you can see I have all of these different types of landscaping materials that I could apply to the scene. So in this scene I have a basic house with a front lawn, so let's go ahead and add some grass to that front lawn. So I can select one of my grass materials here, and notice how my cursor changes to a paint bucket.
4. If I hover over any face in the scene, I can left-click, and it will paint that face with that particular material. Now if I go to a different material, such as this rock material here, again I can paint this face, as well as this face. Now in addition to Landscaping, we've got all sorts of different other types of materials. So if I go over to say, the Wood material, you can see that I have all sorts of wood floors and wood veneers.
5. So I'm going to go ahead and select this wood veneer here, and apply it to this wall here. And again, I could apply it to this wall as well. Now if you're applying to multiple faces, a lot of times it makes sense to select those faces first, so I can apply my materials to whatever face I hover over, or if I want to, I can select multiple faces, and apply the materials to all those faces at once. So all I have to do is hold down my Shift key, and I can select multiple faces.
6. So I'm selecting that one and that one as well as this one, and we can zoom in and find that one as well. So now I have a bunch of faces selected. I can re-select my material, and if you notice when I click on this, it applies that material to all of those faces. Now in addition to materials with textures, we also have colors. Now we have two types of colors, we have one called Color, and those are just basic colors, and again, you can see we have all the different colors.
7. And then we also have what's called Colors Named, and again, this is just another list, but these have descriptive names. So again, it's just a list that we can use, so if I wanted to I could select one of these pale turquoise for example, and I could paint the front door with that color. Now in addition to selecting materials from the list, we can also select materials from our scene. If I select my Home button again, you'll notice that I have four materials now in my scene, and I can actually click on any one of these, and use it to again, paint surfaces in my scene.
8. Another way to select materials is to use the eyedropper. So if I select this Eyedropper icon here, I can hover over any material, and it will select it. So if I were to hover over say, the grass, it would again select that grass and I can paint the grass here on the side of the building. So as you can see, the materials interface is fairly straightforward in SketchUp. It allows you to select colors, apply them to one or multiple faces, as well as pull colors out of the scene using the eyedropper.
9. So go ahead and play with this model or your own model, and go ahead and add some more color and texture to a scene.
   

Edit Materials

1. I've gone ahead and applied some more materials to my model. So let's go ahead and edit some of these materials. Now if I go and touch my home button here it will show you all the materials that are in the model. And if I hover over these you can also see the names. Now if I want to select a material, I can click on it, or I can use the eye-dropper tool to sample any material. And when I do that it will highlight the material on that face.
2. So in this case I have this color here called color E07 which is kind of a greenish color. Now if we want to edit this material all we have to do is hop over to the edit tab, and when we do we have a number of things we can do. We can edit the default color, we can edit the texture image, or the opacity. Let's take a look at color first. Now we have a number of ways to pick the color. We have color wheel, plus a number of sliders, so we have HLS, HSB, RGB, as well as the color wheel.
3. Now I'm going to use the color wheel. Now the color wheel basically just allows you to pick whatever color you want so if you want a red door you can do that, you can ad saturation here, or if you want to change that to something, say like a blue door, you can do that as well.Now once you've changed the color, the color name will actually remain the same. So if I go over here and select this one you'll see it still says color E07. Now since we've changed this we might want to change the name of this to make it a little bit more descriptive.
4. So I'm going to highlight this here and just type in a custom name, so I'm going to type in, say custom blue, and so now I know that this is my own custom color. Now we can also change materials that have textures. So I'm going to go ahead and select the grass dark green here which is this grass on the lawn and let's go ahead and edit that. Now you notice that it does have a default color but that color is overridden by this texture image, so when this box is checked, this image overrides that.
5. Now this image is basically just a JPG, so if you wanted to you could click here and browse for a different JPG. Or you can edit this image in an external editor, such as Photoshop. Now I'm going to go ahead and zoom in a little bit so we can see how this texture looks. Now the grain or the size of the texture is determined by these two numbers here. We have a horizontal and a vertical number, and these determine the size of the texture in the scene so this is really your scale factor.
6. So if you were to have a wood floor you want to scale it to the size of the planks of the wood floor. In this case we have this as three feet by just a little over three feet. So I'm going to go ahead and change this, let's just go ahead and change this to six feet, and notice how this second option changes, and that's because these are locked together. If we want to we can unlock the aspect ratio if we want. But when we change it notice how also that this texture gets bigger.
7. So the scale of that texture is determined by these numbers. Let's take a look at another one of these. I'm going to go ahead and just eye-dropper these rocks here, and let's go over to edit. Now in this case these rocks are pretty fine-grained, and let's say I wanted them to be a little bit bigger. Well again, we can change the scale, so in this case it's 10 inches but let's go ahead and change it to 24 inches. And when we do, again notice how this changes, then that's because it is locked.
8. If we want we could unlock that and change it to whatever aspect ratio we want. And again, just as with the color, when this is changed, if I were to apply this to another object, that scaling would go along with it. Now let's take a look at opacity. Here I have a number of materials that are supposed to be glass. So I'm going to go ahead and eye-dropper those. So let's go ahead over this garage door here, and you'll see that we have this color that's basically been applied.
9. Now if I go over into edit, you'll see that we have an opacity value. In this case it's at 100% which means it's totally opaque. But if we dial this down, you'll see that we add in more transparency, and notice how this also applies to any surface that has that material applied.So if I were to dial down this, it not only affects the garage door, but every other window in the house that uses that material.
10. So we have a lot of control over the materials in our scene. We can change the color, the texture, as well as the opacity.
    

Create Materials

1. There will be times when editing existing materials isn't enough and you'll have to create your own materials from scratch. So let's take a look at how to do that. Now all of this happens in the materials window. If you notice here in this scene, if I hit the home button, there's actually no materials in the scene. So I need to create materials for both the table legs as well as the table top. Now we can do this just by going up here, you'll see we have this little plus sign here and it says create material.
2. So all I have to do is press this and as you notice, this actually comes up and it looks very much like the edit tab in the materials window. So we can go ahead and give this material a name. I'm going to call it table legs. And we can give it a color. So I'm going to give this almost like a grey color. Just a light greyish-blue color here. Now if we want we can add a texture, or affect the opacity as well.
3. But I'm just going to go ahead and leave this just a color and hit okay. And now when I do that, notice how I have this material here called table legs. If I select this, I get my little paint bucket and I can use that to fill in all of the legs. So let's go ahead and do this again for the table top. So I'm going to do a create material and again, we can give this material a name, table top, we can change the color, but in this case we really don't need to change the color because I'm going to use a texture image.
4. So I'm going to select that, and then I'm going to go in to my chapter seven folder and you'll see I have something called wood floor dot jpeg, I'm going to go ahead and open that up.And then we need to determine the size of this image. Now, I don't exactly know how big this scales. So I'm going to let SketchUp decide for me. So by default it's going to one foot by ten and 3/4 inches. So I'm going to go ahead and just use those values and hit okay.
5. And as you can see we got another material here, so I'm going to go ahead and select and apply it to that table. Now if we zoom in you'll see that well, this material looks a little small.There's too many repetitions here, so we can fix that just by going over into the edit menu, and just like we did before, we can change the size. So instead of one foot, let's go ahead and change that to two foot, and keep the size constraint, and when we do that, you'll notice how it changes and makes that a little bit bigger.
6. So as you can see, creating materials is very similar to editing materials. All you have to do is define your color, your texture, and your opacity.
   

Map textures interactively

1. Now, when we bring textures into Sketchup, we can bring it into the material and type in some numbers to size the texture, or we can do it interactively. Let's take a look at how to interactively place and apply textures. I have this simple object here, and let's go ahead and put a texture on it. We could do this using the Import menu, so I'm going into File, Import, and then we want to make sure, down here, that we set this to All Supported Image Types, and then you'll see a bunch of image files here.
2. I'm going to select KnottyPine.jpg, and I want to make sure that this is set to Texture, not Image, and when we do that I'm going to import it, and, as you can see, the image comes into the scene, and it will snap to whatever surface I have, and notice how the icon is a paint bucket. All I have to do it put it in the scene, left click and drag, and then I can size that to whatever size I want, and, when I let go, it will apply that texture and create a material in the scene.
3. As you can see, I've got this material, and it's already created the sizing, so all I have to do is select this, and I can use that to paint the rest of the surfaces of the box. Another way to bring images into the scene is just as an image by itself. This is a create way to create things such as labels. If I go into File, Import you can see I have one here called QualityLabel.
4. If I bring that in as an image it's not going to create a material. It will just bring the image in as an image and map it to a plane that I can size. I'm going to go ahead and import that, and, as you can see, I can place this wherever I want, and I can scale that, and, when I do, it places it on a separate image layer that can go into the scene. I can select this, and I can actually move this wherever I want, so it's actually an image that's floating in the scene.
5. I can apply it to the box or just float it wherever I want. Also notice how this is not creating its own material. That is a little bit of a difference between importing it as an image or as a texture.
   

Map curved objects

1. There are many times when you'll have curved surfaces in SketchUp and you'll also need to apply materials and textures to those as well. So, let's take a look at how to place textures on curved surfaces. So, here I have a simple can which is basically just a cylinder. I took a circle and then push and pulled it into this shape. So, I'm going to go ahead and importan image and apply it as a texture. I'm going to go into File, Import and I'm going to go back to my chapter seven folder here and I have one here called SoupLabel.jpg.
2. Again, I'm going to change this to Texture and then Import that. As you can see, just as before, this floats around the scene and I can snap it to the side of my can. If I left click and drag, and make that the exact same height as the can, it will apply. If I let go, you'll notice we have a little bit of a problem here. That is that it only applies to one of the faces of this can.Now, this can looks like it has just one circular face that goes all the way around but, remember, when we created curved surfaces they're actually created from flat faces.
3. So, if I were to select this and go View, Hidden Geometry, you'll see that I have a number of polygons here that go all the way around and these are just smoothed and the edges are hidden. So, in order to correct this, we have a really, a very simple solution here. I'm going to go ahead and turn off Hidden Geometry and just like before when we pulled in that texture created the material. So, I'm going to select this material and then just Paint Bucket the side of this.
4. As you can see, it now places that material over the entire object. So, in order to get this texture to the right size, what we have to do is import it, size it to the can and then select the material and re-apply it and that will go ahead and change it so that it maps to the curved surface.
   

​Projection maps on curved objects

• Now there are times when you'll have a curved surface and you'll need to control the mapping a little bit more accurately. And to do this, we can use what are called projected textures. So let's take a look at this object here. Now this is kind of a concave surface here, and if I wanted to, I could bring in a texture and apply it to this surface. So I could do a File, Import. I could select for example SoupLabel, make sure that Texture is checked, and do an Import.
• And when I do, we get that same thing we did before, and this allows me to select and then point, left-click and drag, and I can make that the same height as this curved surface. And just like before, it only applies to one of the hidden faces. But we can re-select that in the Materials editor and apply it to that face. And here's the material on that curved face. Now if the material was something like a wood texture or something like that, this may be enough, but for this, we have a very specific label and we want that to be centered.
• And using this method, we really don't have any way to accurately control how this map is placed onto this particular face. So I'm going to go ahead and undo my way out of this, and I'm going to show you another technique that allows you to do projected textures to control your positioning accurately. So here I have this face here and I want to actually project it from a view that's looking directly on it. It almost like how you would project it from a movie projector.
• So I need to create an object that is parallel to that surface. So I'm going to do that by creating a rectangle. So I'm going to go to my Rectangle tool, and then just snap point to point and fill in that space. And then I'm going to select this face here and use my Push/Pull tool to just pull this out just a little bit. So now I have this face here and it's basically going to project onto that curved surface. But we need to be able to see that surface, so I'm going to use my Eraser tool to erase these edges here.
• So all I should have left is my original object, and then this rectangle, or screen, that's kind of just hanging out here in the abyss. So now that I have this, I have all the elements I need to create my projected texture. So I'm going to go ahead and go into File, do an Import, we're going to import that same picture called Soup Label, make sure it's a Texture, and then I'm going to click and drag to make sure that this is the right size.
• And when I do, you can see that I have it, it's centered, and now I need to project it onto this surface. Well when I did that, it created this material here called Soup Label. If I want to, I can select that and apply it to that curved surface, but that's not going to work. Now what I need to do is kind of a little bit of a trick here so follow along here. I need to right-click on this, and this Texture, I want this texture to be projected, so I'm going to go ahead and select Projected.
• And then I'm going to Sample that with the eye-dropper. And when I do, it changes immediately to the paint bucket, and then I can apply this again. Now what it does is it picks up the projected texture from this and applies it to this second surface. And now you can see that this is now centered. And once I have that centered, I can just erase the original object and all I have left is my texture and it's placed correctly.
• So if you need to accurately project textures on to a surface, you can use a second rectangle, apply the surface, use the projected texture, and then use the eye-dropper to grab that material to apply to your surface.

Create a floor plan using bitmaps

1. Now let's take a look at how Bitmaps in images can be used as reference for things such as floor plans of a building. So typically you'll get the floor plan as an image file,and then you'll have to bring that into SketchUp, size it accurately, and then draw against it.So in order to bring a texture in, we'll need something to map it to. And in this case, we're just going to create a simple rectangle. So I'm going to go ahead, and in my scene, I'm going to select my rectangle tool, and I'm going to go ahead and just pull out a basic rectangle.
2. Now I don't really need to go specifically any dimensions because I'm going to size it a little bit later. So I'm just going to go ahead and make a nice big rectangle here. And then I'm going to bring in an image and map it to that rectangle. So I'm going to go in to file, do import, and just like before, we're going to bring in an image. In this case we're going to bring the image called floor plan, and again I'm going to bring it in as a texture. Select import. And then I'm just going to snap that to my rectangle, and then size it up so that it basically fits.
3. And when I do notice how it kind of tiles as well. Now this floor plan actually has dimensions on it, but it if you notice, this is probably not accurate, because I just drew the original rectangle as really whatever I wanted. So I need to make sure that this drawing is exactly the proper dimensions. So I'm going to use this top dimension here of 40 feet. Let me go ahead and zoom in a little bit so I can see it, and then I can use this as my reference.
4. And by using the tape measure tool, I can actually resize my object to match that dimension.So I'm going to select my tape measure tool, going to be very precise here, I'm going to click right here, on the one end of this 40 foot mark, and then drag all the way to the end. And again, try and get it as precise as possible. And notice how when I click the second time it gives me a length of 41 feet, 8.5 inches.
5. So I was pretty close in drawing my rectangle, but not close enough. But we can change that simply by typing in a new dimension. So I know this is exactly 40 feet, so I'm going to type that in, and when I hit enter, it's going to ask me if I want to resize the model. And all I have to do is say yes, and notice how this becomes a little bit smaller. Now this is exactly 40 feet, and so if the other dimensions are accurate, this should be an accurate drawing.
6. And now I can draw against this and get an accurate size for my building. Now when I drew my original rectangle, I didn't draw it to the proper aspect ratio, but that can be fixed very easily. All I have to do is select this edge, and use my move tool to move that along the green axis, and now I've got this perfectly sized. So now once we have this, we can use this as reference to actually draw the building.

Draw a structure from a floor plan. 
Now once I have my floor plan applied to my rectangle and sized appropriately I can start to draw against it to create my model. Now before I do that I'm actually going to turn this floor plan into a component. Now what that does is it allows me to draw on it without actually having my new geometry be part of that model. So I'm going to go ahead and select this, and just do a Make Component. And I'm going to go ahead and just give it the name of Plan.

And so now I have that as a separate component. Now all I have to do is draw against it. Now if I want I could take my basic component and align it to the red and green axes, so if I want to I could take the corner of this building and align it with the origin of the scene. And what that will do is that'll make it a little bit easier to draw into this scene. So all I have to do now is maybe create a top view, so I can draw a little bit more accurately.

So I'm going to go into Window and under Default Tray I'm going to turn on Scenes, and I'm going to go ahead and hit the plus sign to make sure that I have a scene for this, and then I'm going to change my Camera to a Top view, and Parallel Projection. And then I'm going to add another Scene for that. So now I have a Top view that I can use. And I'm going to go ahead and zoom in and let's go ahead and start building our structure.

So I'm going to go ahead and start by drawing out the basic outline of the building, which is also a rectangle. So I'm going to go ahead and make sure that this is exactly the right size.And if you'll notice here it's not exact on my dimensions, but I know it's 40 feet, 26.8 feet. And now that I have that I can start to draw my building.

And if I want I can actually go into Face Style and turn on X-ray, and that'll give me a little bit better view of what I've got here. And if you see that my actual building, it might be a little bit bigger than what I have here, but we can compensate for that. So I'm going to go ahead and do an inset in this. And you can see that this inset is about five inches, so I'm going to go ahead and type in five inches.

And then let's go ahead and start drawing walls. So if I want to I can start using my Rectangle tool to start drawing these walls. And I can again use my Inset tool to make these say four inches, and if I want to I can turn off X-ray, so I can see what I'm doing here. And one of the things is that when I start insetting like this you'll see I get the inset here, but what we can do is we can connect this to this, and connect this to this, so that way we can have a wall without that second inset.
And then again, I need to be using my Erasure tool here to erase those. And if we turn on X-ray again you can see how we're starting to get the structure. And all I have to do is continue to draw these. So if I wanted to I could even draw this wall here by doing it this way, and if I wanted to I could also start to draw door openings.

And again, if I wanted to I could type in very specific dimensions for these. I'm going to go ahead and free-hand these. And I'm just going to go ahead and work with this part of the structure. So let's go ahead and just keep that there, and I'm going to go ahead and turn off X-ray, and then what I'm going to do is start using my Erasure tool to create the openings, as well as erase these gaps between the walls.

And again, I need to create an opening here, I'm going to go ahead and just free-hand this.And as you can see I've go the outline of some doorways, as well as the exterior walls. Now once I have this I can go back into my perspective view, and let's say we've gone ahead and modified all of this, and I can use now my Push/Pull tool to pull up these walls. So if I hit P for Push/Pull, hover over these faces, I could start to pull them up.

And we can give this a height, so let's say we wanted this to be nine feet, I can do that. And now that I have these I can use that same Push/Pull to pull up the rest of the wall. So again, I can Push/Pull here, hover over this, pull this up, and again, type in nine feet. So now I've got some of my interior walls. And again, I can continue to do this. And now that I have these wallsI can start to use my other tools to start building things, such as doorways.

So for example, if I wanted to create the top of this doorway here I could just draw up this way, and as you notice here it's created another face here, I could select these faces and delete them, and then just use my Push/Pull tool to pull that out into the right size. And again, I can use my Erasure tool to make all of this uniform.

So as you can see, there's a pretty straightforward process of taking this floor plan and turning it into an actual structure. Now doing this whole floor plan will probably take me a little bit longer, but hopefully you get the idea as to the process for doing this. So if you want, go ahead and practice, take this floor plan and finish the building.