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 effect is comparable between sample images, I’ll keep using the same wood flooring material that you can see below (and find in SketchUp 2025’s Materials panel under the materials selector dropdown).
The image above on the left shows the raw texture (exported from SketchUp). The image on the right shows the applied material with default settings and one of the default environments active (I chose to leave the “Use Environment as Skydome” option unchecked). Let’s use these as our reference images and dig into the individual parameters next.
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.
Metalness
This parameter controls something that could be called the “clarity of reflection”. When it approaches 1, the surface becomes more like a mirror. For SketchUp’s wood floor material, it is set to zero by default (i.e. not applied) to make reflections more realistic. Below is what happens when we change that to 1. As you can see, the reflection contrast becomes so high that the texture is now barely visible.
We can also evaluate this behavior on an untextured material (that simply has a color) – as shown below. You can see how the reflectivity changes as metalness changes from zero to 1.
Roughness
Roughness affects the “fuzziness” of the reflection. At zero, the reflection is sharp, while at 1 it becomes so fuzzy that the material appearance becomes flat.
Having said this, you won’t be able too see a too drastic difference for our wood floor material (see images below). That is becasue this material uses a roughness map that only applies the roughness effect to parts of the overall texture.
This effect becomes much better visible in the images below that again use only a colored material that features no texture or maps. I only illustrated a maximum roughness of 0.5 here becasue at 1 the material basically has the default flat SketchUp material appearance.
Normal
This parameter affects the “bumpiness” of the material. It is therefore best used when a material has a rough surface (e.g. bricks, wood, water ripples, etc.). By default, our wood flooring material has a 1.0 setting so that the effect is not too overbearing. You can, however, see the effect from zero (perfectly flat surface) to 5 (the maximum setting) below.
This parameter always requires a map (image) that describes the bumpiness of the surface. You must therefore have such a map to be able to use this parameter. However, you can get experimental here and apply all kinds of deformations to materials to make them appear like they have a certain pattern imprinted on them.
Ambient Occlusion
This parameter works similar to SketchUp’s scene ambient occlusion parameter (that can be enabled via the Scenes panel). Only here it does so at the micro level. Its effect in the images below is barely perceptible, but you can see it in the cracks between the wood boards.
The “Old” Settings
Beyond all of these new (to SketchUp 2025) settings, the previous materials settings are still available in their original form. As you can see in the image to the right, the texture image (“Albedo”) can be selected as before. You can also resize and colorize that texture as needed and assign an opacity to the material.
A Word About Transparency
Some rendering software allows you to also add a transparency map to define which parts of the albedo image are shown and which are not. With SketchUp materials that has always been possible with transparent PNG texture files. Those have the transparency channel baked in, which makes an additional transparency map unnecessary. You can see this in action in the perforated metal textures that ship with SketchUp.
Opacity on the other hand is set with the aptly named slide in the materials panel and will affect the entire material. It is therefore best used with glass, water, and the like.
Bonus: PBR Texture Generation with AI
So, what do you do if you don’t have a texture (material) that features the full set of roughness / normal / AO maps? Give the new AI button (see image) a try after loading the “flat” material (image)! It attempts to create those for you and will also try to make the texture fully tileable.
At this point, the AI feature works best with tile-like materials that have a distinct pattern. It does not work so well with materials that have gradients. However, as this tool develops I would expect that to change.
Interactive Example
Using the viewer below, you can experiment with the model from the initial image in this post and explore its various material maps. Just click on the “Material Inspector” button in the viewer, which then lets you turn the various maps on and off.
Resources for PBR Materials
- 3D Warehouse Materials Library – Additional SketchUp materials can be found here
- Rendering in SketchUp (Chapter 5) – This companion page to my book features several links for materials / textures resources.
- Freebies – I have a few materials and 360-degree environments for download on this page.
- The PBR Guide – A very in-depth reference by Adobe Learn
- Physically based rendering – Wikipedia entry