From the course: SketchUp: Tips & Tricks

Create more realistic glass - SketchUp Tutorial

From the course: SketchUp: Tips & Tricks

Start my 1-month free trial

Create more realistic glass

“

- [George] Hi, I'm George Maestri. Today, we're going to take a look at how to make glass look a little bit more realistic by adding reflections. So, here I have a simple building, and as you can see, we've got some glass in this building. Right now, it doesn't look all that realistic. And that's because this glass is really just a solid color. If I go into my Paint Bucket tool, and that should bring up my Materials window, I can Alt Select or use my Eyedropper tool. Now, if you're on the Mac make sure you're in the actual Materials window, not one of the Color windows, and go ahead and eyedropper this. And you can see that if we go into our Edit panel, we have, basically, just a solid color. Now, if I wanted to create a window that looked a little bit more realistic, I could simply just dial down the opacity, somewhere between 50% and 60%, you'd get something that looks a little bit like this. You can see that now we can, at least, see the stuff that's inside the building. We can see through the windows. We can also ade maybe a little bit more color to this. But, again, it looks kind of like glass, but not as much as it really would in the real world. 'Cause real glass actually has a little bit of reflectivity to it. Now, we can add that reflectivity by adding an image of what would be reflected in this particular window. We can do it in a couple ways. I can do a File Import, and I can import a file here. Or, if I want, I can simply go into the material and go Use Texture Image. So, I can either click this box or click on the little file folder, and go into our Exercise Files folder, and we should have something up there called Sky3600.jpg. And if I open that up, you can see it brings that up and it applies it. But let's go ahead and turn up the opacity to 100, and you see that, well, by default this kind of just defaulted to a random dimension, so this is six feet by one foot, ten inches. So, let's go ahead and bring that up to, say maybe 30 feet. And as you can see, we're starting to get those clouds. And so, if I wanted to, I could maybe bring it up to 40 feet, and just get it to a dimension that looks about right for what we want. And once we have that, all we have to do now is just, again, dial down the opacity. In this case, I'll probably bring it down, maybe a little bit lower, to maybe 40 or 50. And as you can see, that image kind of simulates a reflection in the scene. Now, if we were to move this, obviously, the reflections won't move with it, but for a still image, this can actually create a nice little effect. So, if you want to create glass that looks a little bit more realistic, think about adding in a still image as a reflection.

Contents