All about Materials...and how to import new ones[Tutorial]

[Alan Fraser]

This deals with how you use a basic image file that has been acquired either on the Internet or from a CD...or even taken with a digital camera...and bring it into SU so that it can be applied to a surface and added to a Library for future use.

We will assume that the image is a jpg file and that it has already been made seamless so that it will tile when repeated across a large surface.

Step 1. You can either import the image as an image or you can import it as a texture. Which one of these you choose depends upon whether you are just importing one or two images into a model that already contains geometry or whether you are mass-importing images into an empty file to form a new library.

If you are adding a material to an existing model, then import as a texture and stretch it onto the surface at approximately the right size.
If you are mass-importing into an empty file, then it is easier to import as an image...again, scaling the image approximately the right size as you import it. When you have imported all the images (as images), then you can select them all and Explode them.

Step 2. Whichever method you chose to import by, you will now have all the new materials in the In Model library of the Materials browser/palette. If they are generic materials such as vegetation, rock or gravel; and if you are satisfied that they already look to be about the right size, then you can leave them as they are.
If you feel that the size needs to be adjusted...or if the material is a very specific size (for example, a course of 4 bricks, plus mortar) then you need to select that material on the Select tab of In Model, then switch to the Edit tab and change the size accordingly.

Step 3. When you have imported all the images that you want and have scaled them all to the correct size, you then need to save them as .skm files if you wish to use them in other projects.
Again, there are a few different methods of doing this.

If your new material is mixed in, on the In Model Library with many others from the SketchUp standard libraries, then you will need to save this one specific material as a skm. You can do this with a right click on the material swatch, followed by Save As. You can either send the skm directly to the correct folder or you can save it to your Desktop and move it later.

If you have been importing many materials into a new file in order to create a new library, you can use the arrow on the right (just above the library window) in order to save the entire In Model library as a new library. Again, you can either send this directly to the correct location or save it to your Desktop and move it later.

So where is the correct location for these files? It is in the program folder, in the Materials sub-folder. In Version 6 on a PC, for instance, this would be C:\Program Files\Google\Google SketchUp 6\Materials.
Inside the Materials folder you will see a collection of other folders. You will immediately recognise that each of these folders corresponds to a material Library...SketchUp simply reads any sub-folder of Materials as a library. You will also see that inside these sub-folders are all the material skm files. You are free to rearrange or add to these collections of library folders and skm files in any way you like. Your arrangement of The libraries and the materials they contain will be seen the next time you open SketchUp.

As a final note: Unlike previous versions of SketchUp, there are no separate image files. The skm files have been constructed this way precisely so that you can rearrange them any way you like. Each skm is a complete archive. It is, in fact a renamed zip file containing the image file itself, the browser thumbnail plus a few xml documents carrying the details of its scale, transparency, RGB values etc. If you temporarily rename skm to zip you can actually open it and see these files...as you can with a style file also.

[remus]

Just an added tip to help speed things up, TIG's done a ruby that will import all the jpegs in a folder into the model. i think its called getmaterials.rb, ahve a look in diders archive, its in there soemwhere...

[Alan Fraser]

Thanks Remus. I had forgotten about that. There may also be rubies to automatically create skms directly from image files and send them to the correct folder...we used to have one on FF prior to V6, but it's important to remember that such shortcuts won't scale the images. A housebrick the size of a car isn't much use.

[Gaieus]

@alan fraser said:

...A housebrick the size of a car isn't much use.