Components and Materials

[Cady]

How are most people handling components and materials?

I have tried to find them in the 3d warehouse for doors and windows and never seem to find the right one. I have seen several hight quality house designs here and I am curious if everyone is just drawing their own or if there is a better place to download them.

Same goes for materials. Looking for some better wood grain than comes with SketchUP

[Dave R]

You might check the websites of your favorite door and window manufacturers. They may have resources available to download. Some are on the 3D Warehouse but not all.

As to wood grain materials, it depends upon what you want. A lot of folks want seamless woodgrain materials and you can find them on various sources. Seamless wood grain materials don't interest me because they aren't realistic so I make my own from images of entire boards. The typical material image I use scales out to between 4 and 8 inches wide and from 7 to 14 feet long. Often I will have as many as half a dozen images from the same log. The size and number of images allows me to pick and choose parts of the boards much like I would do in the shop when cutting out parts for real projects. That's probably not what you want to do, though.

Here's a thread with links to many sources for texture images.

[pbacot]

Some components from manufacturers or the 3d warehouse can be too complex, or some manufacturer's symbols are surprisingly blocky and useless in showing the style or a realistic window. But definitely check them out. Once you've made (or found) a goldilocks one you like, you can quickly make more.

[Cady]

Thanks for the info and links, I will continue to look through the warehouse and some manufactures. I guess if I found one close I could just modify them.