Recently, while doing an online SketchUp session with one of my students, he asked about creating components with irregular shapes. He was thinking of creating a rug component to use with his furniture models. Although rugs are generally regular shapes, rectangles, circles, or ovals, they often don’t stay rectangular. The rug in the image he wanted to use what quite out of square.

The common approach would be to just draw a rectangle and apply the image as a texture but that’s not always satisfactory. Here’s another way using Image Trimmer from TIG’s SKM Tools suite which you can get from Sketchucation. Image Trimmer takes an imported PNG image and trims away the transparent pixels. You’ll probably need to do a bit of preparation in your favorite image editor before you are ready for SketchUp. Image Trimmer is useful for a whole lot more than just making a rug. You can probably find at least a few applications for your own work.

–Dave

More on FineWoodworking.com:

• “Components” in SketchUp – A reader recently sent a note saying: I started learning Sketchup today for a bookcase I am going to build
• Component Insertion – In my previous blog post I wrote about setting the insertion point for components to make them easy to place in models
• Modifying a Component – Adding Details – The other day I got an e-mail from a reader about the pull I wrote about in my previous blog entry