If you project a texture in Sketchup onto a wavy surface, if the UV distortion is beyond certain limits the material has to be saved as a distorted image, as you can't apply 4 distortions onto an image map into an OBJ file.
Therefore you cab get many images for the facets.
Can I suggest you seek advice from SCF
http://forums.sketchucation.com/ where there are many debates about UV-mapping of textured images... and several free-tools to help that might indeed be better than using 'projection' [which distorts the image if it runs onto not square facets]... It's best if the material is applied 'square' onto each facets and thereby can be mapped from a single image file in the OBJ... Fredo is developing a very good new UV-mapping tool which will be published shortly - watch for that...