Adding Colors and Textures with Materials

To add detail and realism to your models, SketchUp enables you to paint materials on faces. Materials are essentially paints that have a color and optional texture (defined within an image file). For example, in the following figure, the roofing material has a blue color and a texture that simulates metal roofing. The siding and grass are also materials that have a color and texture.

After you apply materials like these to your model, the special capabilities of SketchUp’s materials can help you do any of the following:

• Replace one material with another: Say you want to show a metal roof instead of shingles. You can swap the roofing material for shingles quickly and easily.
• Edit the material: Because the color and texture are separate, you can change them independently of each other. For example, you can change the siding color (how does yellow look?) but keep the same texture. You can also edit a material’s opacity, which controls how opaque or transparent the material is.
• Calculate how much material you need: SketchUp can tell you the area of all the shingles or the siding. Of course, for this calculation to mean anything, you need to create a precise model so that the numbers reflect your model’s actual size.

In the SketchUp interface, you model materials with the Paint Bucket tool () and the Materials panel (Microsoft Windows) or the Colors panel (macOS). The Materials or Colors panel also enables you to view, manage, and organize the materials. The Materials or Colors panel keeps track of the materials in your model, and it's where you can create custom materials collections specific to your projects or workflows.

In the following video, you see how to apply materials and make a few common changes, such as replacing one material for another. For steps that walk you through how to use materials in detail, check out the following sections.

Applying materials

Applying materials to your model is pretty simple: Select a face or faces and then select your desired material. If you’re painting groups or components, check out the tips at the end of this section, which can make applying materials even easier.

You apply materials to your model with the Paint Bucket tool (), which you find in the following parts of SketchUp’s interface:

• Getting Started toolbar
• Large Tool Set toolbar
• Principal toolbar
• Tools > Paint Bucket on the menu bar

To start applying materials to your model, follow these steps:

1. Select the Paint Bucket tool ().
2. In the Materials panel that opens, click the Select tab.
3. In the Materials panel that opens, click the Select tab. If the Materials panel does not open in the tray, the dialog box may be in a hidden tray. In this case, hover your cursor over the hidden tray tab. This will expand the tray. You can then open the Materials panel in the tray.
4. From the drop-down list, select a materials collection.
5. Click the material you want to use.
   
   Tip: To sample a material that’s already in your model, hold down the Alt key to switch temporarily to a Sample tool. With the Sample tool’s eyedropper cursor, click the face whose material you want to sample. Release the Alt key to return to the Paint Bucket tool.

6. Back in the drawing area, click a face or faces to apply the material.

Tip: To restore the default colors, follow the preceding steps, but instead of clicking a material, click Set Material to Paint with Default () in the upper right and click a face in your model to apply the default colors.

You can paint multiple faces and edges at once. To do so, use the Select tool () to select the edges and faces that you want to paint . Then switch to the Paint Bucket tool and apply a material. (Selecting Geometry offers tips for making selections.)

When you apply materials to several faces at once, remember the following:

• Faces have two sides: a front and a back. You can paint the front or the back of all the selected faces, but not a combination. The side you paint is determined by the side you click with the Paint Bucket cursor. In the following figure, clicking the front of a face paints all the front faces in the selection, even though you see two front faces and two back faces.
• Control how the back edges look with a style. When you select a face and all edges and paint the front of the face, all the selected edges are painted. Paint the back faces, however, and none of the edges are painted. To blend back edges with materials, open the Styles panel, click the Edit tab, click the Edge Settings icon, and select By Material from the Color drop-down list.

You can apply materials to a group or component as whole or to specific geometry within the group or component:

• To paint a whole group or component, select it and apply a material. When you select a group or component and apply a material, only faces in the default material are painted.
• To paint geometry within the group or component, double-click it to open its context. Then select the faces you want to paint with a material.

The following video demonstrates several tips and tricks for applying materials to components. Or read on for steps that walk you through how to paint all or part of your components.

To see how this tip works, say you’re modeling a chair with a wood frame and two cushions, and you want to show four cushion colors. The Outliner, shown here, shows that each chair element (the frame and two cushions) is a group, all of which are nested within a group, which is then nested in a component. (See Organizing a Model for more about the Outliner.)

The following steps explain the easiest way to apply materials and show the four color options:

1. Because the frame is the same on every chair, select the frame’s group and apply the wood material, as shown here.
   
2. Create a copy for each cushion color. (Copying What You’ve Already Drawn explains how.)
3. Select a component and apply a cushion color material. Because the frame is already painted but the cushions are still the default color, only the cushions are painted with the color material. The frame keeps the wood material.
4. Repeat the preceding step for each color option. You see the result in the following figure.

Replacing one material with another

Because SketchUp enables you to replace one material with another, you can experiment with materials quickly and easily. In a kitchen, preview different countertop materials, such as black granite, blue tile, and white composite. If you’re picking out house paint colors, compare yellow siding and dark green trim with navy siding and cream trim. When you know the keyboard modifiers, the process is a cinch. Check them out in the following table.

Here’s an example help you visualize how each shortcut works. Say you’re trying to figure out the colors for an abstract mural on two separate walls. The following figure shows the mural mocked up with materials from the Colors-Named collection.

To see how replacing the red with green might look, select the Paint Bucket tool and then select a green from the Materials panel (Microsoft Windows) or Colors panel (macOS). If you Ctrl- or Option-click the red triangle in the upper left, only the adjacent faces with the red material are replaced with green, as shown in the following figure.

If you Shift-click instead, all the red faces become green:

But if you Ctrl+Shift-click or Option+Shift-click, the red faces turn green only on the left wall:

Editing materials

SketchUp enables you to edit materials. As you make changes, any faces painted with the material that you’re editing are updated automatically. Because each material has a color and an optional texture, you can edit the color and texture independently of each other.

Repositioning textures

After you apply a texture to one or more faces in a 3D model, you can adjust how the texture tiles across a face. To do so, you use the Position Texture tool, which has two modes:

• Fixed Pin mode: In this mode, you can move, rotate, scale, or distort a texture. For example, in this mode, you can adjust a texture on one face so that it lines up with the same texture on another face, such as siding on two faces of a building.
• Free Pin mode: If you need to stretch or shrink a texture, use Free Pin mode.

Here’s how to adjust a texture in Fixed Pin mode:

1. Context-click the material and select Texture > Position from the menu that appears. You see a matrix of dotted lines that represents the texture’s individual tiles. The cursor also changes to a hand and four pins are displayed.
2. If you see the four colored pins, as shown in the following figure, move to the next step. If you don’t, context-click the material and select Fixed Pins.
   
3. If you see the four colored pins, as shown in the following figure, move to the next step. If you don’t, context-click the material and select Fixed Pins.
   
4. Use the hand cursor and/or the pins to adjust your texture. In this example, the goal is to move the green pin so that the direction of the wood on the top of the cabinet matches the side. Here’s a quick rundown of all your options:
   • Click and drag the material with the hand cursor to reposition the texture as a whole.
   • Click a pin to pick it up and click again to drop the pin elsewhere on the texture.
   • Drag a pin to alter the texture. Dragging the blue pin scales or shears the texture. Dragging the yellow pin distorts the texture. Dragging the green pin scales the texture or rotates it around the Move pin’s axis. Dragging the red pin, which is the move pin, moves the texture.
   Tip: In Fixed Pin mode, you can also context-click the texture to see additional options: flip the texture to the left or right or up or down, rotate the texture in increments of 90 degrees. The reset option reverts the texture to its original state, whereas the Undo option simply undoes the last command. If you undo an action, Redo also becomes an option.

5. When you’re finished changing the texture, context-click the texture and select Done. Or just click outside the texture to exit Fixed Pin mode.

In Free Pin mode, you can set the size of your texture tile relative to your model. Here’s how the process works:

1. Context-click the material and select Texture > Position from the menu that appears. By default, you’re in Fixed Pin mode.
2. Switch to Free Pin mode by context-clicking the texture and clearing the Fixed Pins option. In Free Pin mode, you see four yellow pins, as shown in the following figure.
   
3. Switch to Free Pin mode by context-clicking the texture and clearing the Fixed Pins option. In Free Pin mode, you see four white pins, as shown in the following figure.
   
4. Click a pin to pick it up and click again to place the pin in its new location. Do this for all four pins to set where the corners of the texture tile appear. If you place the pins in a configuration that isn’t rectangular, you distort the texture.
5. When you’re finished, context-click the texture and select Done. Or simply click outside the texture to exit Free Pin mode.

Calculating material area automatically

If you want SketchUp to calculate the surface area painted with a material, you can context-click the material and select Area > Material. In Windows, you can also context-click the material in the Materials panel, and select Area from the menu. (If the Area menu item is grey, the material isn’t applied to any faces.)

Either way, an Area dialog box shows the total area of faces to which the selected material is applied. The units (such as square feet or square meters) depends on the units specified in your template. See Setting Up Templates for details about changing your default units.

If you use IFC classifications, you can generate a report on materials in your whole model. See Classifiying Objects (and specifically the section on generating a report) for details.

Managing and organizing materials

The Materials panel (Microsoft Windows) or Colors panel (macOS) helps you find and organize materials. The following list explains how you can manage materials with the operating system you've selected in the Help Center.

Creating your own materials

The materials included in SketchUp help you start using materials and explore how they work. To apply materials specific to your own design or building, you probably need to create your own materials. The process is pretty easy: Start with an image to create a texture tile and then specify a color if needed.