Texture Workflow with SketchUp-Photoshop-Podium

By Nomer Adona

In this short tutorial I will show you my work-flow in texturing this scene using Podium, SketchUp and Photoshop. The methodology has been discussed before, but I would love to share it again for those of you who may have missed it.

Step 1. In the first image I am not happy with the brown cloth material on the woman’s jacket. I will need to edit this material to improve it.

Step 1

Step 2. What I need to do is unsoften the geometry in the woman’s jacket so I can see the edges. You can context click on the selected jacket and the Soften Edges dialogue box should appear where you can move the slider to left until you get 0.0 degrees.

Step 2

Step 3. Next right click on the brown material on the jacket and select Texture>Edit Texture Image. You can also go to Window>Materials then click on the Edit tab and then on the highlighted icon to go to your external image editor (PhotoShop in this case). Both methods are shown in the image below.

Step 3

Step 4. Adobe Photoshop should automatically open now if you have this selected as your default image editor. If you haven’t got this as your default image editor then go to Window>Preferences>Image Editor and browse the location of your Photoshop.exe file on your computer. In the image below I downloaded the image called Vietnamese pattern.

Step 4

Step 5. I then tiled the Vietnamese pattern and combined the two textures. I then selected the Multiply blending mode and saved the file.

Step 5

Step 6. The texture is automatically updated in SketchUp.

Step 6

Step 7. Because this texture looks too clean we need to add some dirt to it. I am reusing a procedural texture map that I created before and using the same steps as before. This time though I am using Overlay as the blending mode. I blend the procedural texture to the other texture as shown below.

Step 7

The brown color without pattern used in the original image is what most rural Vietnamese are wearing but for the sake of explaining my workload I changed it to the patterned one.

Completed Texture

Another Approach When I Just Use SketchUp Colors

Sometimes we just use SketchUp colors, for example the woman’s white blouse. Since it is just color and not a bitmap image it can’t be edited in Photoshop. But there is a way. Here is my work-flow.

Step 1. Again I unsoften that part of the model where the white cloth is being used. Next right click on one of the triangulated faces and select Make Unique Texture. SketchUp will then ask you the size of the texture you want and then it will save it in a temporary folder that SketchUp is using. Then I just rename it.

Step 1

Step 2. Now you can edit this texture. The texture is just simply white. I opened another image file and used Merge and Overlay with the white texture and then later will just use a grunge brush to add some dirt to the cloth.

Step 2

Step 3. The next image shows the edited texture added to the scene. To add bump in Podium I just renamed the texture with _bump. Well using Podium and SketchUp with texturing is fun..right?

Step 3

The next image is the screen grab in Podium with the settings that I used.

Settings

This is the original Podium output, no post processing, using Sepo’s HQ.xml. The output size was 1440 x 900 pixels and the rendering time was 9 minutes and 31 seconds.

Podium Output Image

I hope you enjoyed this mini tutorial and it has given you some new ideas.

Thanks

Nomer

Some of Nomer Adona’s other tutorials here at SketchUpArtists:

• Lighting with V-Ray for SketchUp – definitive guide part 2
• Lighting with V-Ray for SketchUp – definitive guide part 1
• Basic IES Tutorial Using V-Ray for SketchUp
• Using HDRI in V-Ray for SketchUp
• IES Light Tutorial using V-Ray for SketchUp
• Create a Tile Imprint SketchUp, Photoshop, Pixplant and V-Ray
• Use Image Editing Software Inside SketchUp
• A Watercolor Line Drawing Ink Effect

Don’t forget to check out Nomer’s own website for more of his inspiring work and free resources.