Painting the Exterior of a Building: Using SketchUp Materials to Enhance the Look

Now let's look at painting the exterior of the building. If we go into our Materials, there are lots of options that SketchUp has preloaded.

We can also download our own materials from various texture sites and then place them in there. But for the sake of this video, we'll only use what SketchUp has preloaded into the model. If you go to Brick Cladding and Siding, this is where you can see various sidings, stuccos, bricks, and blocks.

For this one, let's use the Cladding and Siding White, and we'll paint this portion of the building. Don't worry about painting the interior. If you don't want to paint the interior, you could connect here to here, and then delete these two faces.

That way, you can separate these two. I'll do that for this video. If we wanted to paint these a different color, it's not hitting that.

I'll do the same thing on this side. Line tool, connect to this point. Line tool to connect to this point.

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You can see here that this is where we want to draw this line. And now I see that I have this wood siding. I dropped this material, and I'm going to rename this.

I'm going to call this "Clubhouse Wood Siding." And here, I can actually go and edit and start modifying the color. I can make this into more of a brownish-beige type of color, something that looks nice.

And I can also adjust the size. So this is 3 feet 2 inches, as shown on this swatch right here. If that's roughly 38 inches, that means that each one of these is, two of them is 19 inches.

Divide that by two, roughly 10 inches per panel, right? Let's say that I want these siding panels to be 8-inch panels, right? I'll call this as 24 inches, two feet, right? Now, I can even use a measuring tool to see what this dimension is at now. That's at 6 inches. So maybe I want to go a little bit taller.

Maybe I'll go two and a half feet. Now we're at 7 inches. You know, I think I like the look of the 6 inches better.

Now that we have a nice color for our siding, we can actually start looking at the trim to see what complements it best. If we go into our In-Model Materials, we do have a Door Trim Paint. Let's see what that looks like on the exterior of our building.

I think what would look best is if this were a nice kind of lighter gray color. So let's call this, let's do a gray material and we'll edit this, or let's do a new material, rather. And let's call this "French Door Trim."

And we'll add this nice, warmish white, taupe-type color. We'll paint this. And then if we're in here, we can actually edit this and adjust the colors while we're looking live in the model.

And that's really helpful to kind of understand what we think looks best. Then we'll do the same thing for the French doors. And now we can start thinking about an exterior stucco material.

We do have a, and in our Brick Cladding and Siding, we have Cladding Stucco White. We can click this, and then we can actually double-click into our group, Paint Bucket, click this surface, this surface, and this surface. And now we're able to edit this.

We can call this "Clubhouse Stucco." And then we go to our In-Model and click this. We can actually edit this material.

We want to make this a little bit lighter, add maybe a little bit more warmer tones to it, find a nice balance. And then, you know, the material is the right material, but we can also make it a little bit larger to just emphasize it a bit more. We can go on this side and do a similar move.

Now, as we start looking around, we're like, okay, this is looking really nice. Let's take a look at the flooring for the clubhouse. We can see that there are multiple locations, right? Do we want to have all the same flooring, or do we want to have something a little bit different? Let's double-click onto our floor slab and let's draw a line to subdivide the space.

We have our restrooms, we have our kitchen, and we have our main house. We know that we have a wall right here in the middle. Let's click H to hide it.

And it's actually not in the middle. So let's click this line and use the Move tool. Let's move it over and then click our shortcut H or View Component, Hide Rest of Model, and let's put it right there.

Now we have a few different materials on our building. We know that in our restrooms, we're fine with concrete as it's being accessed from the exterior. I think that sounds good.

And then for our main clubhouse, let's think about another alternate material and possibly the same material for the kitchen. And then the material for the storage room could be a different material altogether. So let's go into Tile.

And Tile has a lot of options on various different types of tile that we can use. There's marble flooring, granite tile, slate tile, canvas tile, ceramic tile, large format, and various tans. And then it's also stone and synthetic surfaces that we can use.

Let's use a synthetic surface for our storage room tile. We'll do this Terrazzo Tile in our storage room. And then we can actually go to right-click, Texture Position, and move this position around to the space where you want to match.

Maybe we want to put it in the corner or we want to tie it in together, kind of make it look a little bit nicer. It looks nice for our storage room. And then our kitchen and in our clubhouse, let's use a more of a nicer stone tile.

We can start looking at Tile Large Brown. What does this look like? We'll click onto this floor. Let's paste, okay.

This is more of these large-format tile stones. For some reason, this is showing very small, right? So these are showing at 1'8" inches by 9 inches. We want this almost double the size.

So let's go to Edit and we'll name this "Clubhouse Tile." And we'll make this size right here double the size, like 10 feet. And then we'll Escape and we'll zoom out to see what that looks like.

You know, maybe we want to darken it a tad, maybe bring down the saturation. And then let's also double-click on our floor again and paint this with that same material. Now we can start seeing that we got some nice flooring in here and we have a lot of these nice materials on the exterior.

The next step would be, let's see what we can do with painting these interior walls, right? Do we want to leave them this default white, or do we want to make some modifications to the interior paint? I think we should do a new material. Whenever you do a new material, it copies the previous material that you had open. So uncheck Use Texture Image and I will call this "Clubhouse Interior Paint."

And then the color will be kind of a nice eggshell white color. Something with a nice tone that isn't too dark. I'll click OK.

And I'll double-click into, I'll undo that. I'll double-click into our room, into our walls and then paint these individual walls on the interior. We'll also paint the restroom walls the same color.

And the kitchen walls and the storage room walls. And now we can kind of see that we have some nice colors in our building. And then let's turn on the roof.

That's the other object that we have yet to modify any sort of materials. So the roof has multiple elements, right? We have our tile roof, we have our fascia board, and we have our interior paint. So right now we have our paint currently selected.

Let's paint the undersides of these small wings and then the large clubhouse ceiling. And now let's paint the fascia boards for these. We know that we want this to be kind of like a wood material, but it doesn't necessarily need to be wood.

We can go to Wood, and there are some general types, wood veneer-type textures that could work well for this. And we'll just go around and select this wood veneer texture. But let's go and call this "Roof Fascia."

And then let's modify the color to be not so orange but more of this darker brown type color. And we'll continue to paint this clubhouse wall as well, double-clicking into the roof. And then the final thing that we want to paint is the roof tile.

So for this, we can go into the Materials and there's Roofing. So there's various shingles, different colors of shingles, there's tile roof, there's shingles asphalt, roofing shingles, and there's stainless steel metal. There are lots of options that we can use.

So have fun kind of picking out what material you think is best. So I want to do this Roofing Shingles Asphalt. I want to paint that side and that side.

I want to name this "Clubhouse Roof Tile." And then I'm going to go deselect that and then go into here and paint this one and this one. And then the final thing that we want to paint is the actual trim piece, right? So this is going to be the edge of the tile.

We want that color to slightly match this kind of dark gray or whatever color you end up choosing for your tile or for your roof tile. So I'll go to a new material and I have this color already kind of generally picked out based off of the average of this. Now, if I just deselect Use Texture Image, it'll actually match that color.

And I can call this "Clubhouse Roof Edge." I'll select OK. And now I'll double-click into this roof and I will use my Paint Bucket tool and paint this edge, the underside, and then I'll pan and orbit around until I get all of these elements.

Then I'll deselect and then I'll go into this upper roof portion and do the same thing. Paint the sides, paint the underside, orbit around, pan around, paint all the different parts. And this side, we’ve got to paint this side and then the underside.

And you can decide if you think that this should be a little bit darker or lighter, kind of what sort of trim you want for that. So I think this is looking really good for a clubhouse. And with this, I will save my file.

And in the next video, we're going to add furniture from the 3D Warehouse and start populating the interior with entourage and furniture. I'll see you in the next video.