Sketch Up paint question

[David Dalzell]

Can anyone tell me how to unpaint something after I have painted it? That is, I paint something with the Paint Bucket just to see what it looks like. I have already saved it and am re-working my model the next day. It still has the wood color but I want to get rid of this and return to the normal Preference colors. How do I do this?

[Tom Veatch]

Click on the paint can icon to open the "Materials" dialog. In the upper right side, next to the right edge of the dialog, you should see an icon that looks like a small square with a diagonal line through it. The upper right of the square is white and the lower left is gray. Clicking on that selects the "default" material. You can then select whatever entities you want to change, and their material will be changed to the default.

If you just want to disable display of the material color, use the menu selection, View\Face Style\Monochrome, and all entities will be displayed with the default coloring.

[David Dalzell]

Thanks Tom. That works.

[Thom Porterfield]

If you turn on the Entity Info dialog (top menu: Window->Entity Info) and then select a face, its properties will show up in that dialog. There will be two rectangles there, displaying the materials (paint) you've applied to that face. The left-most rectangle is the "front" face, the other is the "back" face. When the face is unpainted (ie: default material as Tom Veatch points out above), both rectangles will display that same white/blue-gray diagonal.

But if you've applied a material such as wood grain to a face using the paint bucket approach as you indicate you've done, that left-most rectangle will now show that material. (There are cases where the opposite is true, but that's unusual.) If you click on that rectangle, a pop-up will appear showing all the materials used in your project. If you have tried several, they'll all be there and you can click on any one of them to change the material on the selected face. The default material is there as well, and by clicking on that, you can return your face to the default.

Be advised, that if you select more than one face, and only one has the offending paint, that rectangle will display a big gray question mark, indicating that more than one material is present in the selection set. Also, by using the paint bucket to apply materials, you ONLY paint faces, not edges. It makes no sense to paint edges; they don't look any different if you do and it can cause trouble in a complex model (don't ask how I know this--well you can, but it's a lengthy story).

If you select a face and an edge (or several faces and/or edges) the two rectangles I'm talking about will now be a single square with either the white/gray diagonal or the big question mark. If you click on that, you can change all those entities (faces and edges) to whatever material you like that's already present in your model. Clicking on that white/gray diagonal at the top left in the pop-up changes everything selected to the default.

Hope this helps.