sketchUcation

Using image editors like PhotoShop or GIMP to add elements can dramatically reduce render times and help to keep your SketchUp scenes more navigable.

In this tutorial you will learn how a masked image can quickly add an extra dimension to your SketchUp renders.

This method requires you to be familiar with PhotoShop or GIMP and be able to apply masks and perform various brightness corrections.

In this tutorial, we shall go through setp-by-step, how to distort a material to follow a curve. The example will be an arch but it can of course be anything. In this tutorial, we use two plugins (note that both need some additional plugin libraries installed):

ThomThom's UV Toolkit 2

and Freo6's FredoScale.

Today you will learn how to make a spiralling stairs when you have no CAD files only an image. In this image you can see that we have key dimensions to work from like the stairs width and the inner and outer radii.

This method uses no plugins and requires only a basic understanding of SketchUp. So regardless of your user level you are sure to find some useful tips in this tutorial.