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 some other artifacts. The new materials are in many cases of render-quality while still being quite efficient.
As a result of this change, the size of the entirety of all shipped materials went from 8.9 MB (SketchUp 2024) to 248 MB (SketchUp 2025).
How About SketchUp's Old Materials?
So, what do you do if - for consistency reasons or any other - you want to keep some of the old pre-2025 materials around (in addition to the new ones)? It is actually easy to do that. As long as you haven't uninstalled SketchUp 2024, they are all still on your hard-drive!
Here are the steps:
Step 1: Find...
This image of a wood-veneer tray with a decorative brushed metal ball was exported right from SketchUp - no rendering software needed
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 I discussed in my review of SketchUp 2025, the PBR materials look best when you enable one of the new environments (you can see one in the images below (in the reflection). In addition, you may need to make sure that the "Photoreal Materials" are also enabled for SketchUp's modeling area. You can do that on the Styles toolbar or in the View > Face Style menu.
In this post I will give you a visual overview of the new PBR material parameters. So that the...
Interior reflections like these (on the floor) can easily be done right inside SketchUp with this little 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 or mirrors) with a simple trick. Check out the video below for a walk-through of the process. But in short, here's what you need to do:
Step 1: Create an inverted copy of the model
As a first step, turn your entire model (or at least what will be visible) into a group - or even better: a component (to retain the live link between the two copies). Then flip it along the reflective surface either using the Flip tool or by copying/scaling it. In my case I need a floor...
In this video I am having a bit of fun with the new SketchUp Diffusion tool…
Give this a try: Add only a single cube to your modeling space and then try to create an interesting visualization from that using only the prompts and the styles in SketchUp Diffusion. This is actually a great way to explore prompt engineering. It is interesting how the AI is able to capture the general orientation of the scene from just the cube and the horizon line behind it.
You can find my original forum post about this on the SketchUp forums here. And admittedly I based this on a competition that the Blender community has been doing for a while. Check those out, too.
For more on what you can do with SketchUp and Diffusion, take a look at my initial post about this topic.
Video
https://youtu.be/dQmV58Jlq4c
Examples
Here are some of my own examples:
Prompt: "A treasure in a luxurious space."
Prompt: “A floating, death star spacecraft over a...
In this video tutorial I illustrate a useful technique for cases where you need to combine several texture images into one material in SketchUp. I am using the example of a cross-laminated timber (CLT) here but you can employ this for many other applications. The beauty of using SketchUp for this (instead of Photoshop) is that you can apply textures to correctly-scaled objects (which you first create using SketchUp's modeling tools).
Sidebar: What is a CLT? It is a large 8-foot wide structural wooden plate that can span in buildings approximately 25 feet. It is made from lumber strips that are glued in parallel layers, which alternate directions by 90 degrees. Several buildings have been constructed with these, including our Olver Design Building at UMass Amherst.
How can you use this technique? Give rendering in SketchUp a try. I cover it in Chapter 5 of my book.
Tutorial Video
https://youtu.be/CEQU5DhdpZ4
Tutorial Steps
This list shows the key steps for this technique. Watch the video for further...
