Google SketchUp® 7 For Dummies®

Chapter 8. Modeling with Photographs

In This Chapter

• Painting faces in your model with photographs

• Tweaking your textured faces with the Texture Tweaker

• Modeling on top of photo-textured faces

• Building a model from scratch with SketchUp's photo-matching tools

• Using photo-matching to match your model to a photograph

These days, it's next to impossible to meet someone who doesn't take pictures. Aside from the millions of digital cameras out there, lots of mobile phones have cameras in them, too. I expect that by the time I'm working on the next edition of this book, I'll be writing about the digital cameras we all have in our sunglasses — just wink to take a snapshot and then blink three times to e-mail it to your grandma.

You can use all these photos you're taking in SketchUp in a couple of different ways:

• If you have a model you'd like to paint with photographs, you can do that in SketchUp. You can apply photos to faces and then use the information in the pictures to help you model; building windows is a lot easier when they're painted right on the wall. That's what I talk about in the first part of this chapter.

• If you want to use a photo to help you model something from scratch, you can do that in SketchUp, too. Photo-matching makes it (relatively) simple to bring in a picture, set things up so that your modeling window view matches the perspective in the photo, and then build what you see by tracing with SketchUp's modeling tools. Sound like fun? It is — and that's why I devote the whole ...