Managing Front and Back Faces with Styles in SketchUp – SketchUp Quick Tips
In today’s SketchUp quick tip, we’re going to talk about using styles to quickly find faces that have the back side facing out.
When you’re working with architectural models, especially models that you’re going to run through a photorealistic rendering program, it’s important to have the front face of an object facing the camera. Otherwise, rendering programs can give you texture distortions and other problems.
However, especially when working with models like this one, which I downloaded from the 3D warehouse, it can be difficult to figure out which faces are oriented correctly.
What we’re going to do is use our style settings to quickly find and reverse faces with the wrong face facing outward.
To start, go to the styles section of your tray on the right hand side of the page.
You’re going to want to go to the edit tab, where you’ll see a series of little boxes. You’re going to want to click on the one that looks like a gray box with some blue on it.
Once you click on this, take a look at your model. You basically just told SketchUp that with the style you have active, you don’t want it to render materials, just the default colors for the front and back sides. Now you can easily see most of the faces that have the back side facing outward, and you can go select them, right click, and reverse them.
While this makes the back material faces fairly easy to see, there’s another trick you can use to make these faces even more visible. If you look above your style boxes, you can see the box to set your back color. Click on that and adjust it with the color wheel to be a bright color, like red.
Now it’s even easier to see what faces have the back faces facing out.
Once you’re done reversing faces, you may have to go in and re-apply some textures. This is usually fairly easy to do using the eye dropper and paint bucket tools.
About Justin Geis
Hi, I'm Justin Geis, and I'm the founder of The SketchUp Essentials. I started using SketchUp as part of my work as a general contractor in 2008. I quickly realized the power of the software and started using it for personal projects. I started The SketchUp Essentials as a place to share easy to follow SketchUp tutorials and tips to help everyone harness the power of 3D Modeling in their lives. When not working with SketchUp, I enjoy playing soccer and spending time with my wife and our two dogs.
