Help centre · Modelling

Materials and finishes

Paint surfaces with real-size finishes, adjust tile size, rotation and position, make finishes from your own photos and add your own skies.

Finishes are real materials at their real size: bricks are 215 × 65 mm on every wall, and boards and tiles repeat as they would on site. You paint them onto surfaces one part at a time.

Paint a surface

Press B for the Paint Bucket, or open Library and click a swatch under Materials. The groups run from Paint & plaster and Brick & block to Timber, Tiles, Flooring, Roofing and Landscape.
Click a surface. What's painted depends on the bar's switch:

Whole room (Quick starts here): a wall inside a room paints all that room's walls, the stretches facing it; a wall's outside face paints the outside walls joined to it; a floor paints its room's floor; a door or window part paints every part of it in that material. Hover first: the label says what will change, and it's tinted.
One surface (Architect starts here): only that part.

Pick another swatch to switch finishes (the bar keeps the palette's wall and floor finishes and your last few), and click Done or press Esc when you've finished.

Each click is one undo step, however much it paints. A floor slab that runs under several rooms is painted whole, and a note says so.

Landscape has three waters, Pool water, Pond water and Sea water: see-through, with ripples that catch the light. Paint a slab or a shape with one for a pool or a pond.

Above the swatches, Flat, Sphere and Cube choose how they're shown: as a flat sample, or lit on a ball or a block so you can see how shiny each one is. The choice is kept in this browser.

Each click paints one part:

one side of a wall (each side has its own finish)
the top or the underside of a floor slab
a roof's tiles or its gables
a stair's flights or its rails
one part of a piece of furniture, such as a sofa's cushions or its legs

Alt-click a surface to pick up its finish and paint with it. Shift-click a surface to replace its finish everywhere it's used with the one you're painting with, in one step. Ctrl-click (⌘ on a Mac) paints the surfaces connected to it that have the same finish, such as every wall joined to it, and Ctrl+Shift-click (⌘⇧) only those in the same object. Painting can be undone like anything else.

To select everything that uses a finish, right-click a painted surface and choose Select → All with this finish.

Change a room's finishes in Properties

Select a room (click its area label), and the Properties panel lists its Walls, Floor and Ceiling with the finish on each; pick one to change it. A wall lists each side, named by what it faces (Kitchen side, Outside); a slab its floor; a roof its covering. A room with no floor or roof has Add floor and Add roof. In Quick, right-click a room's wall or floor and choose Paint this room… to go straight there.

Paint one face of a solid

To paint a single face of a shape or imported model, double-click it to open it, press B, then click the face. That face gets its own finish and the rest stay as they were. See Shapes and push/pull.

Adjust the tile size, rotation and position

Select something painted and look under Finishes in the Properties panel. Each finish it uses has its own controls:

Tile size scales the pattern. Turn on Width and height apart to set Tile width and Tile height separately.
Rotation turns the pattern, and Turn 90° turns it a quarter, so boards can run the other way.
Move across and Move up slide the pattern by up to one tile. Use them to line a brick course up with a sill, or a board joint with a door.

Position it with pins

Position with pins (in the Finishes panel), or More tools → Position texture, works as SketchUp's Position Texture. Click a surface with a finish: a red pin goes where you clicked and a green one a tile along the pattern.

Drag the red pin to slide the pattern with it, to line a brick course up with a sill.
Drag the green pin to turn the pattern and make it bigger or smaller, about the red pin.

The change is for that object only (it gets its own copy of a shared finish). Click another surface to pin that, and press Esc when you're done.

Project it one way

For shapes and models you've drawn or brought in (not walls, floors or roofs, which already know their sides), Projected in Finishes sets which way the finish goes on, as SketchUp's projected textures do: Each face from its side (the usual), From above, From the front, From the side, or Wrapped round a vertical axis, for a column or a tank. From above suits paving that runs over a sloping path without stretching.

Change one object or everywhere

At the top of Finishes, choose where your changes go:

This object gives the selection its own copy of the finish first, so boards can run the other way in one room only.
Everywhere changes every surface that uses the finish.

A finish's colour is on the Material tab, and changing it there changes it everywhere the finish is used.

Make a finish from a photo

In Library → Materials, choose My finishes, then From a photo, and pick a picture of brick, stone, timber or fabric.
Give it a Name, and set Width and Height to how much of the surface the photo shows in reality, such as a few bricks or a whole board. It repeats at that size.
Choose matte, satin or gloss. Relief and roughness from the photo is on: the photo's light and dark are worked out into a relief map and a roughness map, so joints and grain catch the light, as SketchUp's Automatically Enhance Materials does. Turn it off for a flat finish.
Click Make and paint.

Your finish is kept in the project, so it travels with it to other devices, collaborators and share links. Its menu has Real size… to change its size, Relief and roughness maps… and Delete. Surfaces painted with a deleted finish keep its colour.

Add relief and roughness maps

From a photo finish's menu, Relief and roughness maps… takes the extra pictures that come with scanned materials, or Work them out from the photo:

Relief: a normal map, for joints, grain and bumps that catch the light as it moves. Relief strength makes them deeper or flatter.
Roughness: where the surface is matte and where it shines, lighter being rougher. If yours is a gloss map (lighter is shinier), turn on It's a gloss map and it's turned round for you.

Everything painted with the finish updates at once.

To use a finish in other projects, choose Save to my library from its menu, or Share with your team. In any project, it then waits under From your libraries in My finishes: click it to bring it in and paint with it.

You can also start from the Material tab: Use a photo… turns a picture into a finish 1 m across and paints the selected material with it.

Light the model with a sky

Under Skies in the Library, click a sky to light the model with it, with real reflections. Below the skies:

Turn rotates the sky round the model.
Light strength makes it brighter or dimmer.
Show as background shows the sky behind the model, and Soften background blurs it.
Remove sky goes back to the plain background.

The sky is saved with the project. For sunlight and shadows at a real place and time, see Site and sun.

Add your own sky

Under Skies, in Your own, click Upload HDRI (.hdr, .exr) and pick a file. It's added to the project and lights the model straight away. Like your own finishes, it's kept in the project and goes wherever the project goes. Its menu has Save to my library, Share with your team and Delete. A sky saved to your library shows under Your own in every project: click it to light the model with it.

To clear out finishes and skies you no longer use, choose Edit → Purge unused (Quick: Edit → More; see Groups, components and tags).

Still stuck? Contact us, or ask in the app: Help → Contact support.