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 the materials and copy them
On Windows, browse to the folder shown in the image below. You can then copy all of the SKM materials or just a single material or collection.
Folder that contains all materials
Step 2: Paste them to the current Materials folder or any other location
You can find the current (SketchUp 2025) materials folder under the C:/ProgramData/SketchUp/SketchUp 2025 path. If you paste the materials there, you will find them as usual in the materials panel once you restart the software. If you put them in a separate folder there, then they will show up like that in the Materials panel dropdown in SketchUp.
If you paste the materials (with your other custom materials) somewhere else, then you may want to add that folder under the Files preferences for SketchUp.
About Converting Materials
As you will see, imported old materials are available in SketchUp without the PBR “upgrade”. Since the various material maps are missing (normal, specular, ambient occlusion), those properties are of course not available. However, the materials are usable and retain their small file sizes (as well as their graininess, repeating patterns,…).
Notice, however, that SketchUp 2025 has a new setting in the Graphics preferences that automatically applies metalness and roughness parameters to all materials. This is usually a good thing so that they get a bit of realistic shininess, but you can always turn that off for individual materials or generally.
Graphics panel in the Preferences dialog
TIP You may want to try out the new AI-powered materials conversion tool on these old materials. Just look for the “magic dust” button on the materials preview.
