How to Texture and Project Materials onto a Koi Fish Model

So in this video we are going to finish our koi fish. If I orbit my model and look at this texture right here, you can see that the intention is to project this shape onto the side of the koi fish.

However, the texture appears to be out of position. With the Paint Bucket tool selected, I can right-click on this surface and go to Texture > Position. Now I can click anywhere along this image, click and hold, and drag to line up the shape within the rectangle.

Then once I’m done, I’ll click outside of the shape or press ENTER. I will go back to the Select tool and orbit around to the other side and do the same thing here. You can either use the Paint Bucket tool and right-click > Texture, or you can use the Select tool, click the surface, and then right-click > Texture > Position.

Now do the same thing: click and drag to match the image to the appropriate size. Now we can see that this texture is reversed on the fish. It doesn’t align with what we intended.

So I can go back to Texture > Position, and then right-click on the image and choose Flip > Left-Right. You can now see that everything lines up correctly. Then I’ll click out of this, and it looks like that would project nicely onto the fish.

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And finally, we have the top koi head texture that we want to adjust. So I’ll click this and then right-click > Texture > Position. For this one, I want to talk a little bit about the four corner pins.

If I move the middle pin, it adjusts the entire texture at once. However, each corner pin does something specific. This one is Move—

If I click and hold, I can drag and snap to specific corners. That’s what Move does. This one is Rotate—

If I click and hold, it allows me to rotate the image around a point. This one is the Distort tool, which lets you skew the image,

And the last one is Scale. I will press Escape to cancel, and right-click > Texture > Position again.

I want to move this here, and then rotate it 90 degrees so the gray triangle appears at the top of the fish.

Once that’s done, I’ll press ENTER. Now we have all three of our planes ready to have projected materials applied to the koi fish. To do that, we’ll go to the Paint Bucket tool and click it.

Now all three of our textures are in the correct orientation and ready to be projected. We will right-click the material and go to Texture > Projected. Then using the eyedropper tool from the Materials dialog box, click it and select the rectangle with the material we want to project.

Now if I go to paint the fish, you can see in the lower corner: ALT = sample material, Shift = paint all matching materials, CTRL = paint all connected faces, and Shift+CTRL = paint all on same object. If I click CTRL, I get three little squares. If I press Shift+CTRL, I get another indicator. I’ll make sure none of those are selected.

That way I’ll paint only the selected material. I’ll click Paint, and as you can see, this material projected nicely onto the fish.

Now I’ll do the same thing by orbiting around the model. I want to project this material onto the left side of the fish. However, this time, when I right-click > Texture, I won’t click Projected yet—

I want to show you what happens if we apply a non-projected material. So I go to my Eyedropper tool, click the material, and paint the face.

As you can see, it becomes a jumbled mess—it’s not the nice projected texture we want like on the other side. So I’ll orbit back around and undo that. This time, I’ll right-click the material, go to Texture > Projected, then use the Eyedropper, click the material, and paint the fish.

Now you can see this material is painted nicely on the body of the fish. And finally, we want to paint the head of the koi fish. We can right-click the material, choose Texture > Projected, and instead of clicking the Eyedropper tool manually, we can see in the tooltip that ALT = sample material.

So I can hold the ALT key to activate the Eyedropper, click the material, and then with it selected, paint the head. And there we have it.

There is our painted koi fish. Now that we’re done with our textures, we can go back to the Tags dialog box and delete the “Textures” tag. To do that, right-click the “Textures” tag and choose Delete Tag.

It’ll ask whether to assign the tagged objects to a different tag or delete them. I will choose Delete the entities. Finally, I will save my file as our koi fish.

Now that is all I would like to do to build our koi fish. We can now load this fish into our fountain as a component. Now that our file is saved as koi fish, I’ll go back to File > Open and open the fountain we previously created.

I’ll close the Materials and Tags dialog boxes, then open the Components dialog box. If I click the Home button right here, this will show me the components currently loaded in our model. We have our fountain profile that we created, and we have the original man that we deleted at the very beginning of the file.

Now if we go to File > Import, and if we’re not already in the C drive, we can go to Local Disk (C:), SketchUp 101 file downloads, and then find our koi fish. We can load this into our model. If we click Import, it brings in the object as a component.

I’ll click out here for now—I just wanted to confirm it loaded into the Components panel—and I will delete this component by pressing Delete on the keyboard. Now, if I click the koi fish in my Components panel, I can begin placing this fish around the fountain. I’ll do so now in various areas.

I’ll click to place one here, then go back to the Components panel and place another, move it here, and continue. Once it’s in the model, we can use shortcut keys to rotate and reposition. Please have fun placing as many fish as you'd like inside your fountain.

I’ll now save my file, and this completes our fountain. I’ll see you in the next video.