Book Image

3D Printing with SketchUp

By : Meir Gottesman
Book Image

3D Printing with SketchUp

By: Meir Gottesman

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (16 chapters)
3D Printing with SketchUp
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Printing models with color


It takes a special machine to 3D print in full color, and at this point there are only commercial printers to do the job. This means that unless you're part of a large organization, you'll likely use a print service for printing in color, providing them your model in a format they can use.

Let's discuss how SketchUp processes color data.

Textures versus solid colors

You can color SketchUp models in two different ways—with textures or with plain colors (or a mixture of both). Textures are image files such as .jpg, .png, or .tif. The satellite imagery from the terrain we imported in the previous example is a .jpg texture.

Colors are simply solid colors based on RGB values or color names that cover an entire face. Colors are easier to apply than textures in SketchUp, but need more model detail to provide a similar appearance.

In the following screenshot, a satellite image texture is applied to the top face, while the bottom and side faces have a solid color applied:

The...