SketchUp materials deliver magic to your designs. Without materials you’ve got something fairly interesting and informative. With them your work is inspirational. And it’s so quick and easy to use materials for SketchUp to bring designs into vivid, realistic life. This guide looks into everything you need to know about downloading SketchUp materials such as marvels like SketchUp materials stone choices – including everything from rockery stone to building stone – along with wood materials, SketchUp materials collection insights and more. Read on to find out how to enhance your drawings and inspire your stakeholders.
What are Materials in SketchUp?
Let’s tackle the basics first. What are SketchUp Materials? They’re essentially digital paints with a colour and an optional texture, all defined within an image file. You might want to use a blue roofing material, for example, with a realistic-looking texture that simulates metal. The SketchUp materials collection is enormous, giving you everything you need to create designs that don’t just look great, they look real enough to convince clients, colleagues and everyone else. By making your drawings as realistic and accurate as possible, you make everyone’s life easier, including your own.
Think stunning coloured roofing tiles created in a few clicks to enhance unusual building designs, imagine a huge variety of wood materials for everything from furniture to garden decks and architectural projects. The SketchUp materials stone collection is equally impressive, a host of beautiful finishes to bring your drawings to the next level. There are grass and landscape material, plus many more materials for SketchUp, that are all free to use.
Browsing and Downloading Materials for SketchUp
So where do you find all this amazing stuff? Materials for SketchUp can be found and downloaded from the 3D warehouse, a huge collection of free resources for users to dive into. The only limit is your imagination. Why not have a look for yourself? All you do is enter the search query ‘materials’ into the search box at the top of the page to see what’s there. The popular 2016 stone colour collection, for example, contains 34 different materials covering all sorts of stone types, from golden sandstones to pale and dark grey slate-look materials and pure white marble.
There are countless brilliant wood materials textures to tap into as well. There’s wood with and without a strong visible grain, in every shade and colour, whether it’s decking for your garden design or wood for kitchen cabinets and work surfaces. Marble wall pattern material helps designers create drawings of luxurious interiors and exteriors, and there’s a host of gorgeous landscape related materials to enjoy. Imagine a collection of materials for making hyper-real trees, shrubs, site furniture and more. Think travertine steps and black slate tiling, and loads of wonderful tile materials including mosaic tiling and subway tiling, marble tiles and patterned ceramic tiling.
How do you download all this fabulousness? SketchUp materials download is really easy, the same as everything else in SketchUp. Once you’ve found the material you want to download, simply click the Download button. If you like you can download just the material itself and avoid importing the whole component into SketchUp.
Let’s use this collection of wood materials and textures as an example. To download individual materials from this collection, from the model info (RHS) – click ‘Materials’. This’ll present you with a list of the materials used in the particular model. Each has a name and dimensions, along with the file size. Just find the material you want then click the ‘Download’ button. That’s it.
How to Import New Materials in SketchUp
So you’ve downloaded the materials that inspire you, and it was as easy as pie. Now you need to import the material files into SketchUp to use them, and it’s equally simple. Maybe you want to use wood materials, SketchUp collections of every kind of wood. Here’s what to do:
- Select File > Import
- Find the Import dialogue box
- Navigate to the material image you’ve downloaded
- Select it
- Select ‘Use As Texture’
- Click Import.
This very simple process makes the imported materials available in SketchUp for you to play with in any way you want. As you can imagine, using pre-created materials saves users a huge amount of time and effort. So now there’s no need to go to the trouble, time and expense of making a travertine floor tile of your own or spend ages making convincing looking grass when there’s plenty of ready made options that are right at your fingertips.
How to Apply Materials in SketchUp
Next, let’s look at how to actually apply the materials for SketchUp you’ve chosen. Again, it’s a super-easy process that makes designing and drawing such a pleasure, smoother and faster as well as more efficient and a whole lot more fun. Experimenting with various materials and textures is one of the biggest joys of using the software, driving instant design and boosting your creativity.
Here’s how to apply materials in SketchUp on a Windows PC:
- Find the paint bucket tool in the Getting Started, Large Tool Set, Principal toolbar, or in the menu bar under tools-paint bucket
- Select the tool
- Open the materials panel
- Choose a collection of materials
- Click on the material you want to use
It’s just as easy and fun on a Mac:
- Find the paint bucket tool in the Large Tool Set toolbar, the tool palette, or in tools-paint bucket
- Select the paint bucket and a colours panel appears
- Choose a colour using one of four colour picker tabs or use the materials collections
- Choose the materials collection you want to use
- Click the particular material you want to apply to your model
Imagine being able to apply an attractive basalt stone surface to your kitchen design in no time. If that doesn’t give you the effect you have in mind, it’s an easy matter to change it for, say, a pale limestone surface or something vivid and colourful in little glass mosaic tiles. It’s so quick and easy you can do it while a client observes, letting them choose the finish they prefer while you work. And if it turns out you love creating materials of your own, you can add them to the 3D warehouse for others to use and enjoy. It’s a community thing, adding more materials for SketchUp to keep the inspiration going.
If you haven’t tried it yet, you might want to explore a collection of marvellous SketchUp tutorials, designed to make your journey of discovery even more exciting and speedy. Then make your way to SketchUp Pro to explore the magic of the software in detail. You’re going to love it.
