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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Yes, You Can Use OpenAI’s GPT AI to Create Geometry in SketchUp (With Ruby Snippet)
Just like everyone else these days I have been trying out OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing (which now also uses the same AI – artificial intelligence – engine). One of my lines of exploration (beyond “what does this thing know about me?”) was the question whether it can auto-generate SketchUp Ruby code with AI. And […]
Floor Flatness Check in SketchUp with Point Clouds
In today’s post and video, I am using this tool to perform some analysis with the same 3D point cloud data that I introduced earlier (a scan of our classroom). I am basically checking how level the floor in our classroom really is by using what is aptly called a “floor flatness analysis”.
Creating an Undulating Wall with Scale By Tools in SketchUp
This week’s video tutorial shows an application of my recently published Scale By Tools SketchUp extension. Specifically, the Move Vertices by Image tool allows you to modify a mesh based on image data, which as a result embosses the image on that surface. This can then be used to create terrain, but it has many […]