Textures are images that are applied to faces in the model. Sketchup includes several default textures in the Materials panel.
There are two types of images that can be used as textures in model.
- Seamless textures – They are meant to be tiled multiple times across a face. The image tiles blend together so we can’t see where the seam is. This let’s us use a smaller image size, are free to apply a seamless texture to any size face. The material will tile as many times as it needs in order to cover the face.
- Full-cover textures – They are large images that span the entire face. They look better because there aren’t any unnatural repeating areas, and they look more custom. The drawback is they are more work to apply, and the file sizes are usually bigger than used a seamless texture.
Sketchup supports pretty much every image format, except DDS. So any JPEG, PNG and PSD files are fine, and we can even use V-Ray’s .vismats files if we have the V-Ray rendering tool add-on. TIFs give the most realistic rendering, as these are print-quality images with super-high resolution, giving us textures the added detail that’s particularly important for games design and animations.
Despite this, it can be a little tiresome to collect enough high-res imagery to build up a sufficient and diverse collection of Sketchup textures to use in our 3D art, so we’ve made it easy with our roundup of the best SketchUp texture packs. Here are the best Sketchup textures available at the moment.
Damaged wall bricks
Sketchup Textures offers a number of free textures, we just have to register with the page in order to access them. There are plenty of useful ones here, but we like these damaged wall bricks. Other brick options include snow bricks, Italian bricks and old bricks.
Green Grass
Vegetation and foliage textures are some of the most useful for 3D artists, and this green grass texture could become a staple of Sketchup texture library. To access it, we’ll need to register with Sketchup Textures, enabling to download up to 15 textures per day. If that’s enough for then we can become a member to get 50 daily downloads.
Wood Textures
Wood textures are a solid start if we want a nice wood grain effect for any project. The full pack comes at a reasonable price, but for the budget version, it can download six of Lost & Taken wood textures here.
Concrete Textures
These real marble images will add the architectural design, and it can be used for free in both personal and commercial projects.
Stone Walls
Digital 3D artist Joost Vanhoutte runs Texture Ninja, a textures site. Although most of his packs are completely free, he appreciates a donation to keep his textures site alive. This pack includes a whopping 111 different stone textures, so we can be sure to find one that suits our project.
Dirt and Soil Textures
Free Sketchup Texture Websites
3D Warehouse
When viewing a model on the 3D Warehouse that has materials in it that we like to use, we don’t have to download the entire model. We have the ability to extract one or more of the materials from it, instead of having to download the entire thing. This makes it a great place to look for textures.
Some examples are flooring textures, roof textures, granite textures, tile textures, shingle textures, stone textures, wood textures, brick textures, carpet textures, concrete textures, flooring materials, stone materials, wood materials, laminate materials etc.
We might even find manufacturers that have material collections on the 3D Warehouse with official products. For example, Certainteed Horizontal Siding, Shingle siding, Vertical Siding, Formica Laminates, Formica Solid Surface.
SketchUpTextureClub.com
Many free seamless textures are available. We must create a free account in order to download them. A premium account will get us higher resolution images along with access to image maps for rendering. Textures are downloaded as image files compressed in .zip format. We will need to unzip the folder in order to import the image for use in a Sketchup material.
Max Textures
Another good library of 700+ seamless textures. Built by a talented 3D artist working in the gaming industry. Keep the gaming industry in mind when searching for texture assets for your architectural models. It is one of the best site to download Textures with High definition quality.
https://www.textures.com/Textures.com
It is a high quality texture library. The site is a freemium service that uses a credit system. A free account will get you 15 credits per day. There are a certain set of textures that can download with a free account, at a low resolution. For higher quality downloads, we will need to have a premium membership.
Finding more textures
If we can’t find what we are looking for on any of these websites or on the 3D Warehouse, try Googling it using the keywords “Seamless” or “Tileable”.
If we are still stuck, then we can try creating our own tileable texture using Photoshop, materialize, PixPlant, or Substance.
