SketchUp for Design
Tutorials, News, Book Companion Materials
Tutorials and News
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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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Save a SketchUp File as an Older Version (Ruby Snippet)
SketchUp 2024 removed the option to save files in all previous version formats, now only offering a version-less format from 2022. A Ruby script workaround lets users save to older versions.
Construction Site Logistics Planning with SketchUp
In this tutorial I cover various approaches for construction site logistics planning in SketchUp. This begins with importing an accurate geolocated site, constructing a rough building model from a plan, and then laying out the construction site with pre-made components from the 3D Warehouse. This is then followed with crane location planning.
Adding AI Vision to SketchUp with OpenAI’s gpt-4o Model (Ruby Snippet)
Earlier this week, OpenAI released its new gpt-4o model. This model not only improves and updates its current AI models, but it also adds vision ability. As a result, a user can upload images and then the AI can identify things in the image based on a user prompt. There are some great examples of the new capability on OpenAI’s website.
Since I previously implemented the OpenAI connection with SketchUp using either plain Ruby code or a handy extension, I had to try out whether we can connect the two using these new capabilities, too…