Want to Keep Some SketchUp Pre-2025 Materials Around?

Want to Keep Some SketchUp Pre-2025 Materials Around?

by Alex SchreyerNo Comments
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...
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PBR Materials Cheat Sheet (for SketchUp 2025)

PBR Materials Cheat Sheet (for SketchUp 2025)

by Alex SchreyerNo Comments
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...
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Realistic Material Reflections for Interiors with SketchUp 2025 (it’s possible with a TRICK!)

Realistic Material Reflections for Interiors with SketchUp 2025 (it’s possible with a TRICK!)

by Alex SchreyerNo Comments
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...
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SketchUp 2025 is Here!

SketchUp 2025 is Here!

by Alex SchreyerNo Comments
To properly introduce ThomThom - this version's scale figure - I decided to go with a Nordic look for this post's title image 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...
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