Figured wood materials?

[Ytsejamr]

So has anyone found/created materials for figured woods? I'm talking about curly maple, curly cherry, quilted maple . . . etc.

I see the birdseye maple in the library. I've never really had any luck making my own. I'm just curious to see if anyone else has.

-Brian

[PurpLev]

I'll have some posted shortly

[PurpLev]

The problem with figured materials is that the repetitions (tile effect) are quite noticeable most of the time. to get really good results you should either use a very large image source to cover your entire piece (to avoid tiling), or minimize those materials to narrow parts (2x2 legs for example) so that the tiling effect is not so noticeable. of course the source image should not have too many color variations that stand out too much or it'll be obvious it is repeating itself.

regardless. I've added Curly Cherry, and Quilted Maple materials to the library which can look decent if laid our properly. give it a shot.

[Pete Bennett]

My son who is a senior designer at Jaguar in the UK showed me a really great way to get realistic wood surfaces into my sketchup designs. What we did was go to www.veneerselector.com chose the veneers we required and they list virtually any veneer you can think of. placed them on the desktop. Then I scanned my sketchup design into photo-shop and using the modify tools etc. we placed the woods where ever we wanted them into the design. Re-printed them and they looked just like a real wood cabinet. He even showed me how to drop the cabinet into photographs of the room setting which really made the whole thing look professional. Apparently they do this kind of thing all the time at Jag, as those that can afford it can choose virtually any veneer they want for their interiors. Hope this is of some use

[Onboard]

TWS, it may have been implied in your explanation, however, can you put the final image back into SketchUp to do additional modifications if needed?

[Pete Bennett]

To be honest I never tried as it was actually a finished design that I showed him. He wasn't greatly impressed with what I'd tried to make it look like Ripple Sycamore framing with Burr Walnut panels. Unfortunately I no longer have the design as it's with the clients and I' waiting for them to return from Sweden later in the year. But, I might try something else.

[AMarshall]

From my experience, once you export an image to Photoshop or any other image editor, you can not come back into SketchUp and modify your model. Exporting an image just takes a "Snapshot" of the current model. You can of course import the image back into SketchUp but it won't be a model - just a bitmap.