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...
We don't always need to work in 3D. Space layout planning for interior design, event planning, facilities management, etc. is often easier and faster in 2D. As it turns out, we can do this quite effectively in SketchUp's 3D modeling environment or on LayOut's 2D sheets, without even creating a full 3D model.
Here's an example: An annotated furniture layout, based on a DWG plan
In this tutorial I show how you can easily import a plan (either an image or a CAD file), scale it, and then start laying out perfectly-sized furniture. There are different workflows in SketchUp (this works in Free or Desktop) and in LayOut (SketchUp's drawing preparation software that comes with your subscription). In this tutorial, I cover both of those workflows.
Tutorial Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7D8VaoVj8A...
In this tutorial video I describe various ways how you can print scaled, parallel-projection views from SketchUp for Web as well as SketchUp Pro/Desktop (where I will be using the LayOut software).
I cover all the relevant aspects and then show how you can use the PDF file format as an intermediate print file format. This video is an update to my older one on this topic. Since that video was posted, SketchUp for Web has been introduced and printing in SketchUp Pro/Desktop has changed. Hence the need for an update.
As I describe in Chapter 6 of my book, printing to scale is very useful for a variety of fabrication tasks, including paper-folding or sheet metal fabrication. You can even combine this very well with my Unwrap and Flatten Faces extension.
Tutorial Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxPzmSw_tlg...
With the recent introduction of SketchUp 2024 came one change in functionality that has the community talking here and here. In 2023, when you went to the File > Save As... dialog, you had all of the SketchUp versions available all the way back to version 3 (Why not version 2? That's when I got into SketchUp!) as a file format option (see image below). With 2024, this has now gone away and files can "only" be saved in the version-less SketchUp file format that was introduced with SketchUp 2022.
SketchUp Desktop 2023
SketchUp Desktop 2024
In principle, the version-less format (which, by the way, has with the 2024 version also been introduced for LayOut) is a very convenient thing: You can open a newer file in an older version (albeit with a warning that some functionality may be lost). That makes working in computer labs (which are notoriously slow to update) and other environments much easier. It is also VERY MUCH better...
Infrared thermal imaging (thermography) when combined with SketchUp's 3D models has great potential to interactively visualize complex building science issues like heat loss, insulation, moisture leaks, and more. Being able to view 3D models instead of just 2D images makes it possible to see effects on a building's scale. All you need (beyond your SketchUp modeling abilities) is a thermal imaging camera (e.g. the FLIR ONE which is not too expensive). In this video I show you how you can take appropriate thermography images and then apply those to your model.
I actually wrote about this technique a while ago in a blog post and a conference paper. Follow the link at the bottom of this post to learn more about the technique and to see more models. There are even some sample images for download in case you want to try this yourself.
My finished thermography model of the John W. Olver Design Building at UMass Amherst is available on the...
