Rendering in SketchUp: From Modeling to Presentation for Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Interior Design

SketchUp Native Textures

SketchUp comes with preinstalled or native textures. To review these materials, open the Paint Bucket tool from the toolbar (or press B, which is the keyboard shortcut). The Paint Bucket pull-down menu lists various texture categories, including Brick and Cladding, Colors, Fencing, Groundcovers, etc. (Fig. 7.2).

Fig. 7.2: Native textures in SketchUp

Although SketchUp’s native textures can be used for rendering, these materials are low in resolution and small in size (256 n 256 pixels). You’ll learn about texture size shortly. In general, the native textures are not ideal, nor will they produce the best graphic results. The exception is when you’re using these textures with the Shaderlight IRP. Shaderlight supports these textures in a unique fashion, which will be discussed in Chapter 27.

Native SketchUp textures are stored in a unique file format called .skm. The .skm textures are image file types created specifically for SketchUp. The SketchUp Material Library can display only .skm file types.

This limitation means that custom texture libraries can’t be listed in it. As stated, custom textures will be stored as JPEGs and other image file formats not recognized by the Paint Bucket tool. This does not mean that the Paint Bucket tool cannot insert, replace, and include custom textures. It just means that you can’t store them in the SketchUp Material Library. ...