UV Mapping & displacement in Sketchup

[Bosseye]

I had a few issues with this, so thought I'd do a simple tutorial to possibly help others out.

This is a really simple run through, and I'm far from the expert, so if anyone notices anything I've done wrong or claimed incorrectly, let me know!

Ok then, essentially we're looking to learn how to control the orientation of your displacement map within Sketchup so that you can change the way your displacement maps look and work with your surface texture.

STEP 1 To start then, we have Derek stood by a square of concrete. Lucky Derek. Its just a simple plane with a texture applied in the material editor.

STEP 2 Now, select the plane, press G to open the component dialogue box and make it a component. Call it whatever you like. Now, double click on your new component and right click the concrete and select 'EDIT ACTIVE MESH' under the SKIndigo heading. You get this dialogue box pop up:

Max subdivisions runs from 1-9 and governs your displacement quality. I tend to set mine to 9 as it gives me the best results, although I hear that this might be overkill. Set this value to whatever works for you. Leave Curvature threshold, pixel threshold etc as their defaults.

Now, below those boxes we have UV Mapping settings. It will be displaying a UV set of SU (Sketchup) with a UV Texture of Sketchup. This means it will use whatever you have set as the displacement map in the SU UV set in the material editor.

We want to change this UV texture and mapping to something else, so that our concrete texture renders but displaces with the properties of a different UV texture.

Change the UV set to 1
In UV Texture, click Add New and in the window that opens, navigate to the texture you want to use to displace. I'm using a black and white line pattern to make this tutorial really obvious.
Select your texture and the concrete texture we had on our plane disappears and the Lines texture appears.

STEP 3 If you select this face with the Line texture applied, you can right click it, navigate to 'Texture' and then position and rotate as you would with any other Sketchup texture. I've shrunk mine to make the lines smaller.

If you change the UV set and UV mapping texture back to SU and Sketchup then the Lines texture goes away and the concrete texture returns.

STEP 4 Right click the concrete texture, select 'Edit' under SKIndigo and in the SKIndigo material editor that appears set your displacement settings.
Click the '....' box to assign a texture.
Click 'New' and navigate to the Lines texture. Note that in this drop down box you can have the textures used in your UV sets so you can switch between them easily.
The UV set here with by default be set to Sketchup (SU). Change this to match the UV set you just made in step 2, in our case UV set 1.
Click Accept.
Done! Your texture is now set to displace using the texture map you've set up in UV set 1

Rendered using UV set 1

Now you can repeat the steps to set up other UV sets (to a maximum of 4 I think).
In the 'Edit Active Mesh' dialogue I've changed UV Set to 2, left it as the Lines texture and the rotated this texture 45 degrees.

Go back into your material editor, and the displacement material settings, change the UV set to 2

Render and voila, its now displacing in line with the rotated texture.

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Hope that makes sense and helps some people out.

Cheers

[bubs]

Thanks Bosseye! Much appreciated.

[Juju]

yep, thanks indeed, would +rep yo if the board had the capability.

[Pibuz]

That is a really wonderful explaination.
I think it's worth being added in the skindigo manual. Thanks bosseye!

[bubs]

+1

[Zom-B]

+1

[Lucas Rivera]

I tried every single step. Over and over. New files. Different subdivisions. Nothing makes it work.

[Lucas Rivera]

I tried step by step many times. Changed actual sizes on textures. Checked for scales. Searched for answers all over the forum. I can't get it to work on my laptop.

[Pibuz]

Here to report that this workflow does not work anymore for me... sigh...

The face is exported in Indigo but shows errors (missing triangles)

[rivera-b]

So Pibuz.
Did you ever solve it?
I find that the displacement mapping sequence is hard and unclear.
Today After hours and hours of trying I found that the image size on the map does not match the UV mapped sized image.

Are you using 1:1 images sizes for your maps?

I see you work with roughness and specular maps and your textures are flawless.

[Pibuz]

Hi Rivera!
I'm not working with displacement maps since a long time now!

I can't really be of any help to you, sorry!

I usually work with textures big enough for my needs, I tend not to use HUGE maps everywhere because of the weight, but for large areas I try to use big maps with good resolution (and seamless too).

[rivera-b]

I forgot to thank you.

Sorry!

And thank you!

[Pibuz]

ahahahah you're welcome!

..this reminds me of a funny little story, saying that one day Albert Einstein was asked how he liked better the eggs done. He didn't answer. One year after, he casually met again the person who asked him, and said: "Scrambled" out of the blue. Funny genius of him.

[Paraket]

In case of problems with displacement, use the png format. Tiff and tga sometimes turn on insanity mode.