With a longstanding dedication to empowering designers and beautifully bringing their ideas to life, SketchUp software offers an intuitive, comprehensive 3D modeling toolset straight out of the box. Still, users can supercharge its capabilities with a range of powerful extensions.
SketchUp's Extension Warehouse features hundreds of plugins for everything from animation and urban planning to interior design and architecture. These tools eliminate repetitive tasks, improve accuracy, and streamline workflows, allowing designers to customize and enhance their SketchUp experience. But with so many extensions to choose from, diving in can feel daunting. Get started with this list of the top 11 SketchUp extensions to extend and customize your workflows.
1. CleanUp3
Clean and optimize your SketchUp models. With ThomThom's CleanUp, you can make your 3D models lighter and correct some possible errors. Duplicate components, unused materials, and hidden geometry can bog down your model and lead to glitchy, laggy performance in SketchUp. CleanUp helps you resolve these issues for faster, optimized models.
2. DropGC
DropGC (drop groups and components) allows you to easily and efficiently drop 2D or 3D objects like cars, people, and plants onto 3D terrain in SketchUp. Just click and drag to drop objects into the model until they intersect with the face beneath them. This saves time, improves accuracy, and eliminates tedious and repetitive tasks.
3. Eneroth FaceCreator
Want to quickly create faces without tracing over each one in SketchUp? With Christina Eneroth's FaceCreator, you can generate all faces from a selection without needing to trace any edges. Useful for imported CAD floor plans and more, this extension automates manual work and can be run with Joint Push-Pull to extrude all wall faces simultaneously.
4. Material Tools
This collection of tools helps streamline material management in your SketchUp models. Use it to assign material to faces, remove material from the entire model or a selection, ensure unique filenames, paint roofs, and more.
5. Fredo Hide All Edges
This extension offers the fastest way to soften or hide edges in SketchUp. Select the entities where you'd like to hide all edges, then run the extension. All edges will be processed recursively within nested components and groups. The tool can also unhide all edges at all levels of the current selection.
6. Selection Toys
If you want to create, manipulate, and filter selections in seconds, Selection Toys is a must-have extension. It provides a range of selection modifiers for filtering out all edges so you can quickly select entities with similar properties, such as material or layer orientation.
7. Profile Builder 3
Profile Builder 3 is an essential SketchUp extension for building walls, foundations, fences, or railings. Leverage the tool for parametric assemblies, one-click assembly creation, parametric holes and openings, or to revolve a profile. It can also be used as a smart-path selection tool or to trim, extend, split, and edit the path of profile members and assemblies.
8. V-Ray
The Studio subscription includes V-Ray, the premier 3D rendering software that combines real-time and photoreal rendering within SketchUp. From beginner to pro, V-Ray has all the tools required to visualize SketchUp projects from start to finish. Use it to open SketchUp scenes in real time and apply render-ready materials to any scene.
9. RoundCorner
When you want to fillet and bevel 3D shapes more efficiently, RoundCorner is the answer. This tool rounds the edges and corners of 3D geometry along a 2D profile with three mode options including: round corners, sharp corners, and bevels. RoundCorner also supports concave corners and non-orthogonal edge faces.
10. Architextures
Architextures is the easiest way to generate seamless, high-quality textures, bump maps, and hatches in SketchUp. Thanks to the instant import of materials, you no longer need to download, import, and scale materials manually. Save time by testing materiality options in your interior design or editing imported textures instantaneously.
11. Material Resizer
This is the perfect extension for cleaning up large models. Discover the size of every material in your models. Then, choose to resize large materials by picking one or more and setting the maximum dimensions.
Once you've mastered SketchUp's native tools, extensions can greatly increase your overall productivity and efficiency by simplifying and automating more complex functions. After you dig into these essential extensions, you'll wonder how you ever modeled in SketchUp without them!
Check out the Extension Warehouse today to discover the top extensions for your industry, or explore more of SketchUp in a free trial.
