How to change the direction of a texture in a group?
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Hello everyone. Sometimes I feel like a dunce.
I've been trying to find the edit tool that allows you to change the direction of a "material texture" such as "Light Wood flooring" once it has been assigned to a group. I find all kinds of editing tools to do various things, but nothing that simply changes the direction from green to red or vice versa. Any clues out there? Thanks
fitZ -
Hello fitz, if the texture is in a group, double click on the group to edit it then right click on a textured face>texture>position, right click again>rotate and choose an angle.
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fitZ,
Massimo's instructions are dead on correct however, if you've applied the material to the group or component and not the faces inside, you won't have this option. You'll need to open the group/component for editing before applying the material to the faces. Then, right clicking on a single face will give you the Texture entry in the Context menu.
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Oh yes, Dave is right. If you have painted an entire group with one material after the group was created you can explode it, re-group and then follow the method above.
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Actually, you don't need to explode the group. Just repaint the group with the default material (there's a button for it in the upper part of the Materials dialog box), open the group for editing and paint the faces with the desired material.
The analogy I use with students for groups and components is a sandwich wrapped in clear cling wrap. You can see inside to the entities in there but you can't change them without opening the wrapper. You can spread your mayo on the outside of the wrapper if you wish but it doesn't do anything for the sandwich inside.
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Nice example, Dave.Well, the conclusion here is; never use the paint group/component feature if you need the texture orientation. Also, this way you can never wrap/project a texture on your model so the texturing tools are pretty limited when doing so.
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Thanks Gai.
8 years ago I was on a flight from Atlanta to Minneapolis. (It was about three months before 9-11 so flying was still alright.)Somehow I ended up in first class and was served dinner. When the salads were served, I watched as the fellow next to me proceeded to pour his salad dressing onto the cling wrap over the top of his salad. He sat there and looked at it for a long beat. Then he took the wrap off the salad and turned it over and spread what he could of the dressing onto his salad. I expect it was due to the fairly large quantity of alcohol in his blood stream.
I think of that guy every time I run into a component or group that has been painted.
There is a benefit to painting components if you don't care about texture orientation, though. You can make instances different colors without breaking their relationship with each other. That would be easier on the entity count and file size. Of course you have to paint each component separately.
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@dave r said:
...There is a benefit to painting components if you don't care about texture orientation, though...
That's true and it can be a good technique in certain cases. But as you say, that's mainly with colours (not textures). A good example (with cars) for this is mentioned at the (almost) bottom of the (old) SU Guide chapter/page about components:
http://download.sketchup.com/sketchuphelp/gsu6_win/Content/G-Entities/Ent-Component.htm -
Due to VfSU I never paint groups/components any more. It takes an insane amount of time to process the model if it contains painted groups/components.
Hope that changes... -
Thomas, that's interesting. I never paint groups or components so I've never run into that. It's good to know.
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You can open the image in photoshop and rotate it and then re-adjust the texture dimensions in the Material Edit window. This works easily if you only have to rotate it 90 or 180 degrees however.
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Cristopher i guess that's not a smart move. you can rotate the image straight in sketchup, in various ways, plus it works at any angle.
BTW did you noticed this tread is from 7 years ago?
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or you could simply change the axes orientation for that object - unless you expect different texture orientations for each face...
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