As you just saw in the CLT example, having a good texture makes all the difference when you create renderings in SketchUp. I also discussed this in some length in the book (especially in the rendering chapter). To expand on this topic, here are some tips for two cases:
Making a Seamless Texture
Obviously a seamlessly repeating (a "tiling") texture is the most efficient way to go when you use textures. This allows you to use a small image to fill a large space. And if you use a good texture, you won't even see any seams or repeating patterns. As I described in the book, there are many places where you can get good quality tiling textures.
Steps
What do you do when you need to make your own? First of all, start with a good image! This typically requires a few simple but important steps:
Find the texture you are looking for (a brick wall, grass etc.). Be careful with the sun's position....
Rendering of the newly-textured CLTs
With Cross-Laminated Timber (often abbreviated to CLT) available now as a new and exciting building material, I am sure some of you will need to include these in your SketchUp models, too. To help you out a bit, I am making SketchUp components of 3-ply and 5-ply CLT panels available. You can download them from my 3D Warehouse account (you can just search for "CLT" in the Components window in SketchUp).
Models and Textures
Click on the links below to preview and access them. I am making these available under a Creative Commons Attribution License.
If you need the raw textures for your own creations, you can download these images from my Flickr account here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexschreyer/8892850629/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexschreyer/8892850691
These are from my textures set....
Rendering of the penny floor
Today I came across a great idea on Google+: Use coins as flooring - preferably one cent pieces (that are even taken out of circulation in some places). With a bit of resin on top, this ingenious flooring solution adds sparkle and a wonderful warm glow to a room.
While adding this to a real floor should be pretty labor intensive, as it turns out, creating a texture for rendering proved quite easy. You can grab the diffuse texture as well as the bump map from my flickr pages by clicking on the images below and then use them in your own projects.
Coin floor texture
Bumpmap for texture
And here are the material settings for Twilight Renderer:
The texture repeats a bit, so make sure you adjust its rotation a bit to remove that effect. Also, you might want to add the bump texture into the reflection channel to only have the pennies reflect....
I just posted a quick description of Sketchfab's new interactive WebGL material editor on my personal blog. You can find the post here:
https://alexschreyer.net/cad/improve-your-webgl-models-on-sketchfab-with-the-new-material-editor/
Even if you don't use Sketchfab to publish your 3D models, it is actually quite useful to just upload a generic model and experiment with the material editor's parameters. These are the same parameters that come up when you work in a rendering software's material editor. Using Sketchfab's editor, you can interactively change them and see what happens....
The raw, unrendered version
Happy New Year Everyone!!!
Now that my Christmas / Holiday Card is "so last year", it is time to reveal how it was made. For a tutorial (that also includes the Ruby script I used for it), go to the SketchUcation.com website. You can find the tutorial there.
http://sketchucation.com/resources/tutorials/48-advanced/306-scripting-a-christmas-card-with-ruby...
