SketchUp for Design
Tutorials, News, Book Companion Materials
Tutorials and News
Latest Posts
Want to Keep Some SketchUp Pre-2025 Materials Around?
Now that SketchUp 2025 has been released, SketchUp’s materials have experienced a significant upgrade. All materials that ship with SketchUp are now PBR (physically-based rendering) materials that look much better than the older materials, which at the time were designed with efficiency in mind. However, that efficiency often came with graininess, unpleasant repeating patterns, and […]
PBR Materials Cheat Sheet (for SketchUp 2025)
SketchUp 2025 introduced a new graphics system for materials: PBR (physically-based rendering) photoreal materials. As you can see in the image above, you can now have shiny, glossy, dimpled, and otherwise textured materials right in SketchUp’s model area. You can then use that new appearance while modeling or when you export images or animations. As […]
Realistic Material Reflections for Interiors with SketchUp 2025 (it’s possible with a TRICK!)
SketchUp 2025 introduced some very nice visualization capabilities: PBR (physically-based rendering) materials and environments. While those are great (especially for exteriors), indoor material reflections are a bit trickier since objects cannot be reflected even with the new PBR materials. In this tutorial I’ll show you how you can create some good-looking reflections (in e.g. floors […]
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Getting Started with SketchUp: My Top 10 Tips
This post’s video tutorial features a list of my standard SketchUp beginner tips and tricks. SketchUp has much more functionality (see my book to learn about the rest!) but these ten tips will get you started with SketchUp for desktop, web, or iPad and clear up some typical confusions.
Coding Your First SketchUp Extension
In this (beginner!) tutorial I give a very basic overview for creating a SketchUp extension from scratch and then distributing it as an RBZ file. Admittedly, this isn’t completely from scratch since I am staring with a template file that you can download from this site, but the result is a very simple yet fully-functional SketchUp extension.
PBR Materials Cheat Sheet (for SketchUp 2025)
SketchUp 2025 introduced a new graphics system for materials: PBR (physically-based rendering) photoreal materials. As you can see in the image above, you can now have shiny, glossy, dimpled, and otherwise textured materials right in SketchUp’s model area. You can then use that new appearance while modeling or when you export images or animations. As […]