SketchUp
Description
I blame a YouTube video. Some guy in 2014 put up a timelapse of himself designing a whole house in SketchUp in under twenty minutes. The walls went up, the roof snapped into place, he pushed and pulled surfaces like they were made of clay, the camera orbited around the finished model like a drone shot from a real estate listing. I watched it three times. By the fourth replay I had already downloaded SketchUp Make — the free version that existed back then — and was staring at a blank canvas with three colored axes and a tiny human figure standing in the middle of nowhere. His name was Susan. I later learned everybody calls him that. I have no idea why.
That first night I spent four hours trying to model my bedroom. The push/pull tool was magic to me for the first thirty minutes. Draw a rectangle, push it up, you have a wall. Draw another rectangle on the wall, push it in, you have a window. The logic was so intuitive that I have assumed that the rest of the software would be equally simple. It was not. I tried to make a curved wall for the bay window area and got something that looked like a crumpled piece of paper. The arc tool fought me. The follow-me tool — which is supposed to sweep a profile along a path — created geometry that folded in on itself like a failed origami project. I saved the file, closed the laptop and did not open it again for two weeks.
But I came back. That is the thing about SketchUp. You always come back. The learning curve is not steep — it is deceptive. The first 70 percent of Sketchup is the easiest 3D modeling experience you will ever have. The remaining 30 percent will cause you to question your spatial reasoning, your patience and, on occasion, your decision to not just pay an architect.
SketchUp was first developed by a company called @Last Software in 2000. Google bought it in 2006, made it free, and basically made it the default 3D modeling tool for anyone who was not a professional. That is when it exploded. Students, hobbyists, woodworkers, game modders, interior designers who did not want to learn AutoCAD — everyone ended up in SketchUp because Google made it accessible and free and it was good enough for 90 percent of what normal people needed. Then Trimble acquired it from Google in 2012 and the slow creep towards monetization began. SketchUp Make became SketchUp Free, which migrated to the browser. The desktop version became SketchUp Pro, which was changed from a one-time purchase for $495 to a subscription for $349 per year. That subscription is now $349 a year for Pro and $749 for Studio, which includes V-Ray rendering and Revit import. There is no going back to perpetual license. Trimble made that clear.
The free web version is surprisingly good for what it is. You get the core modeling tools — push/pull, move, rotate, scale, the offset tool that saves hours when creating wall thicknesses — plus access to the 3D Warehouse which is the single best thing about the SketchUp ecosystem. The 3D Warehouse has millions of models uploaded by users. Need a particular IKEA sofa for your living room layout? Someone already modeled it. Need a Honda Civic for a parking lot scene? There are fourteen versions. Need a detailed model of the Sagrada Familia for some reason? It is there and it is going to crash your file because it has 800,000 faces but it is there. I once downloaded a model of a kitchen faucet that was more detailed than the actual faucet in my apartment. The person who made it included the inside valve mechanism. I do not know why. I respect them.
The problem with the free version is all that it doesn’t include. No solid tools for boolean operations. No dynamic components. No Layout, which is SketchUp’s 2D documentation tool for creating actual construction drawings with dimensions and annotations. No extensions. That last one is the real killer. Extensions are what make SketchUp Pro really powerful. There are extensions for parametric modeling, for creating terrain from Google Earth data, for calculating material quantities, for rendering photorealistic images without leaving the application. The Extension Warehouse has thousands of them, and the best ones – like Profile Builder for creating parametric assemblies or Curic Mirror for symmetrical modeling – turn SketchUp from a toy for hobbyists into a legitimate production tool. Without extensions the free version is a sandbox. A good sandbox, but a sandbox.
I purchased SketchUp Pro in 2019, when I was renovating my small apartment that I had just rented. Sixty three square meters, horrible layout, the landlord said I can move non-structural walls. I modeled the entire space in two days. Every wall, every door swing, every electrical outlet I imported furniture off of the 3D Warehouse, placed them, realized that the couch I wanted would block the hallway by fifteen centimeters, and ordered a smaller one before spending any money. That one decision – knowing before you buy – paid for the subscription. I printed some construction drawings from Layout and gave them to the contractor and he said they were better than what he normally gets from clients. That was the high point of my SketchUp experience. Everything worked. Everything made sense.
Then I tried to model something organic and the honeymoon was over. SketchUp is essentially a box modeler. It thinks in straight lines, flat surfaces and sharp edges. The minute you need a curved surface more complicated than a cylinder or a sphere, you are fighting the software. I wanted to create a custom bookshelf with a wavy front edge — nothing crazy, just a little S-curve over the top shelf. It took me an entire afternoon. The geometry kept tearing. Faces would not form. I had to stitch triangles together manually like a surgeon. In Blender this would have taken 10 minutes using a bezier curve and extrude modifier. In Rhino, maybe five. SketchUp simply was not designed for this and no amount of extensions even fully rectifies that limitation. If your project involves anything organic, fluid or heavily curved, SketchUp will punish you for choosing it.
The performance issue also needs to be mentioned because it will bite you back eventually. SketchUp is a single processor (CPU). 1. In 2026. A model with 500,000 edges will begin to stutter. A model with two million edges — which is easy to get to if you import detailed 3D Warehouse components without reducing their complexity — will make orbiting feel like dragging a boulder through mud. I learned this the hard way when I imported a detailed model of a bathroom vanity that someone had exported from Revit. From smooth to slideshow in seconds the file went. The solution is to purge unused components, use low polygon models for background objects, and obsessively organize everything into groups and components. But the fact that a $349 per year software still can’t do multi-core viewport navigation is embarrassing when Blender — which is free — handles scenes ten times larger without breaking a sweat.
The rendering situation has improved with the Studio tier including V-Ray, but for years, SketchUp’s native rendering was essentially non-existent. The default style is that distinctive white-with-black-edges look that screams “this is a SketchUp model” from across the room. Getting photorealistic output required third-party renderers — Enscape, V-Ray, Lumion, Twinmotion — each with its share of subscription and learning curve. My favorite was Enscape as it rendered in real-time and had a simple interface, but costs $699 per year on its own. So you are paying $349 for SketchUp Pro plus $699 for Enscape and suddenly you are over a thousand dollars a year for a workflow that Blender plus a free render engine could replicate for zero dollars. The value proposition only makes sense if your time is worth more than the cost of the software which for professionals it probably is, but for hobbyists and freelancers it is a hard sell.
Layout deserves its own paragraph as it is the most under-appreciated and simultaneously most frustrating part of SketchUp Pro. It connects to your 3D model and creates 2D views — plans, sections, elevations — that are updated when the model changes. In theory, this is brilliant. In practice, Layout is slow. Painfully, inexplicably slow. Switching from one page to another takes seconds. Rendering a viewport in vector mode can freeze the application for thirty seconds on a model SketchUp itself handles fine. The text and dimension tools look like they were designed in 2008 and never updated. Every architect I know that uses SketchUp has the same complaint: the modeling is fast, the documentation is torture. Some of them model in SketchUp and do their drawings in AutoCAD which defeats the whole point of having Layout in the first place.
I still use SketchUp. I renewed my Pro subscription last month for the fourth time. I use it for furniture design, apartment layouts, and quick concept models when a client needs to see an idea before committing to it. For those things — boxy, architectural, straight-edged things — nothing is faster. I can have a presentable model ready in an hour that would take me three in Blender because I would spend two of those hours changing viewport settings and remembering what keyboard shortcut does what. SketchUp’s interface is out of the way. The tool count is small. The inference engine — the system that snaps to edges, midpoints, axes and surfaces automatically — is the best in any 3D software I have used. When it works, modeling in SketchUp is like thinking out loud.
But I would not recommend it to all people anymore. If you are a student, use the free web version and get familiar with the basics. If you are an architect or interior designer who does mostly rectilinear work, Pro is still great. If you are a product designer, or a game artist, or anyone whose job involves organic shapes, do yourself a favor and learn Blender or Rhino instead. SketchUp will allow you to create the box. It will fight you the minute you try to go around the corners.
