As of this week (February 25, actually), the latest iteration of SketchUp – version 2025.0 – is now available. Desktop users can click on the Help > Check for Update menu item and download it (or get it here) and iPad users can see new (version 7.0) features once the app updates. Users of the web app will apparently need to wait a little bit longer to see the new visualization features appear.
What’s New in SketchUp?
There are a bunch of new features, some of which were teased at last year’s Basecamp/Dimensions conference. Let’s dig into those…
PBR Materials and Environments
Now that SketchUp has a new graphics engine under the hood, it was apparently possible for the developers to implement not just ambient occlusion (which was introduced with SketchUp 2024), but also PBR (physically-based rendering) materials and environments. With those capabilities, we can now have materials right in SketchUp that have a full roster of shininess/bumpiness/transparency that we previously could only implement with rendering software such as Enscape or VRay. You can even have perfect reflection (i.e. mirrors) within SketchUp’s modeling space (with a caveat, more on that later). In addition, the new environment capability can provide 360-degree backdrops as well as a feature called image based lighting (IBL) where the color of the environment influences the scene color in SketchUp as well. And – just to reiterate – that is all happening right inside SketchUp’s modeling space, no external rendering software required.
Check out this comparison (drag the slider):
TIP
For a background on PBR materials, HDR environments, and IBL lighing, check out Chapter 5 in my book “Architectural Design with SketchUp”. I cover those topics in the rendering context, but that is now equally applicable to SketchUp’s graphics engine as well.
Here’s another example of what is now possible. This was exported straight from SketchUp with File > Export > Animation:
When you look at the materials panel in SketchUp, you can now see many additional parameters (under its Edit tab), like metalness (which controls reflectivity), roughness (controls blurriness), normal (controls bumpiness), and ambient occlusion (adds micro-shadows). For all of those, you can load an industry-standard image map that controls how the parameters are implemented.
Best of all: SketchUp’s built-in materials have received a work-over and are now equipped with those parameters, so that you don’t have to worry about them and can use the (now much better) material appearance. You can also find many more PBR materials in the 3D Warehouse.
In addition, there is now also a small “magic dust” icon (on the material preview cube) that uses AI behind the scenes to adapt any non-PBR texture materials to the new PBR system. It also makes those materials tileable, which is a great feature. In my tests, this works reasonably well, but some manual parameter adjustments may be needed. You also don’t have as much control over e.g. the normal map as you would if you created the various maps manually.
TIP
Check out my PBR Materials Cheat Sheet (for SketchUp 2025) for an in-depth look at the various parameters.
Reflective materials would be nothing if there wasn’t something to reflect. Enter: Environments. Those are full 360-degree panoramas that are often created from photographs but could also be rendered. They are typically saved in the HDR format, which retains more color information than a normal photograph. As a result, the color and brightness in such images can be used to influence ambient light in a graphics enviroment like SketchUp’s new modeling space, which provides added realism.
You can add an environment to a SketchUp model in the new Environments panel. Either use a pre-made one or upload your own. You can also decide whether you want to make it visible (used as a background) or just use it for lighting and to appear in reflections (adjust this under the Edit tab).
It is important to understand some of the limitations, however. As you can see in the following image, while environments are being reflected by PBR materials (the ground plane here), model elements are not. This is especially noticeable in fully-reflective surfaces like windows or mirrors. Therefore, my suggestion would be to use especially full reflectivity sparingly. I usually go for full reflectivity in windows and curtain walls (see the first picture in this post) and partial reflectivity for other items like stone or the like. Reducing metalness a bit and increasing roughness usually creates an understated reflectivity that often already benefits a scene tremendously.
There is a technique that could be implemented for object reflections (called screen space reflections, you can see an example here), but we’ll need to see if that is possible in SketchUp’s new graphics engine. There is, however, a workaround which I am discussing in another post. Such reflectivity is of course fully possible with the various rendering software that is available.
Likewise, artificial lights are currently not possible in SketchUp. Even though underlying graphics engines like the new one in SketchUp often technically (likely – I don’t know for sure) allow for those (see Sketchfab’s viewer for example), my guess is that lights would be too cumbersome to implement and that they are better left to actual rendering engines.
When working with external rendering software, SketchUp’s new PBR material settings now also export (and import) as long as the USD or GLB file formats are being used.
Extension Migrator
This new built-in tool is a great solution for folks that use a lot of extensions. It basically migrates extensions from an older version of SketchUp to a newer one. As part of the migration process, you will get presented with a list of “migratable” extensions that you can then check/uncheck as needed, e.g. to clean up space and make SketchUp faster.
While this will migrate not just extensions that were installed from the Extension Warehouse, users of SketchUcation’s Plugin Store may still prefer to use its re-install capabilities when migrating to a newer version of SketchUp. But this way, the Plugin Store extension itself can finally be migrated.
Trimble Connect and Save Out
Trimble continues to make the link between SketchUp and Trimble Connect – their sharing platform – easier. While it was possible previously to open a SKP file stored on TC and then save it there again, the new functionality also lets you insert/reload TC-hosted content into your model and can also save out (export) parts of your SketchUp model. This allows for finer-grained project and model updates.
The new Save Out feature even appears in the right-click menu as long as you hover over components, which is very useful for extracting those to save as an external file, to TC, or to the 3D Warehouse.
If I were to suggest an improvement on the desktop version: The File menu items New, New from Template, Open, and Open/Save from TC could all be combined into the open dialog that now apparently only shows when SketchUp is first started. Such behavior is already fully implemented in the web and iOS, so why not have it also on the desktop?
What Else is There?
- You can now update visibility of tag-organized objects in scenes better with the new Apply Tags to Scenes functionality. This makes maintaining extensive scene collections (e.g. for walkthrough visualizations) easier.
- Various modeling tool improvements were added, such as new grips for the rotate tool.
- A new Purge Unused reminder dialog has been introduced because the new materials and environments can be quite sizeable, which can quickly increase model file size.
- Interoperability improvements for IFC and RVT files. For example, importing an IFC file now creates tags for all IFC classes. This makes working with IFC files later simpler.
- Live Components have apparently graduated from SketchUp Labs and are a full feature now. It would still be great to see them (and Trimble Creator) better integrated into SketchUp in the future. But as part of this release we now can use a large collection of new parametric components.
- Style Builder has been retired. This tool that let users upload their own hand-drawn lines has apparently seen too little use, given that there are already a bunch of usable sketchy line types built into SketchUp’s various styles.
What’s New in LayOut?
The main improvements in LayOut are the same as in SketchUp: PBR materials and environments are now fully included. That means that users can create much better-looking documents and sheets in LayOut. As expected, those can be controlled and adjusted via the SketchUp Model panel in LayOut’s sidebar tray (environments are under Effects).
Other Improvements
- Move, Rotate, and Scale tools are now better available as toolbar buttons and with similar behavior as in SketchUp. There are also now very handy Split and Join tools for lines.
- Users can now control better which pages are being printed or exported as PDFs.
In Conclusion
SketchUp models look better from version to version. First, ambient occlusion and now PBR materials can add a good amount of realism to any visualization (and even the modeling environment itself) so that photorealistic rendering is not overly necessary for many applications. We can, after all, get great visuals simply by exporting SketchUp’s view. It is also good to see how Trimble Connect interoperability is becoming more and more integral to SketchUp.
What do you think of the new version? Let me know in the comments below.
Videos
There are a bunch of review videos on YouTube. Below is Aaron’s video that – by the way – shows my Random Tools extension at one point (thank you!).