Prepare to explore your creativity like never before with a new generation of visualisation in SketchUp 2025. Photorealistic materials and environments provide powerful yet user-friendly tools to make your designs stand out. Experience and interact with lifelike materials to make informed material decisions and create assets that enhance your clients’ understanding of your vision. Even better, users can access these groundbreaking visualisation features across SketchUp for iPad, Web, and Desktop, as well as LayOut and 3D Warehouse.
“Having photoreal materials and environments natively within SketchUp is a really exciting development! Accessing high-quality, realistic materials directly within the platform has made it much easier to quickly present designs that resonate with clients.“
– Kate Hatherell, Director, The Interior Designers Hub
Tell a richer design story with access to a new library of Photoreal Materials. These materials bring dynamism to models by accurately depicting texture and showcasing how real-world materials absorb and reflect light. Unlike flat images, Photoreal Materials incorporate layers of textures or maps that create realistic effects such as shine, roughness, or metalness.
From one-click, drag-and-drop material ‘painting’ to advanced settings and the ability to create your own Photoreal Materials, SketchUp 2025 can be your one-stop toolkit for stylised visuals, photorealistic conceptual design or a gateway to advanced visualisation workflows. Get started with the default Photoreal Material libraries and access hundreds more materials in 3D Warehouse.
In addition to exploring the brand-new Photoreal Materials, elevate your material design with the Generate Textures feature. With just one click, this innovative generative AI can sample an image or classic material to create new Photoreal Materials. Generate Textures also simplifies the process of creating seamless, tileable SketchUp materials. Your SketchUp models have never looked better.
Environments can serve as the primary light source for your model, playing a crucial role in accurately depicting photoreal materials. Discover and utilise environments in the new Environments panel, where you can switch the Skydome on or off and adjust the image angle, exposure, and reflection settings to your liking. Check out the 3D Warehouse for a library of environments
Create the perfect ambiance with realistic environmental lighting that dynamically interacts with photoreal materials. These environments utilise 360 degree (HDRi or EXR) image files, offering both a background image (skydome) and a light source that photoreal materials react to.
Move in and out of SketchUp with confidence, knowing your data will be preserved thanks to our latest enhancements in IFC support. With increased consistency in data round-trips and reliable file import and export, you can preserve your building information and reduce the need for manual corrections. Key updates include improved IFC class recognition, version retention, geometry optimisation, and the addition of new dictionaries for components.
Revit Importer UI updates offer more control in SketchUp over what Revit model elements you bring in. Leverage evolving interoperability with Revit and IFC files for streamlined design workflows, improved collaboration, and greater accuracy in project execution.
It’s easier than ever to access the high-quality content you need – introducing the SketchUp Content Library in 3D Warehouse. Kick-start your project with all-new collections of configurable models, Photoreal Materials, and Environments developed and curated to support our most popular workflows. Check-in for regular content releases, updates, and upgrades.
Add rich context and iterate on detailed designs faster than ever before. Pre-built configurable objects, known as Live Components, are not new but are officially graduating from SketchUp Labs. Subscribers can configure parameters like size, type, and material to create customised objects in a snap – access 200+ new and refreshed components via 3D Warehouse as a full production feature in 2025.
LayOut will be more intuitive than ever in 2025. Core LayOut tools now better match the tool behavior in SketchUp, so the transition from 3D in SketchUp to 2D in LayOut is much smoother. LayOut viewports will also display Environments and Photoreal Materials in addition to Ambient Occlusion, offering further visual consistency and compatibility throughout the SketchUp ecosystem.
This new SketchUp release takes another step forward in helping creative professionals eff ortlessly bring their visions to life. It off ers enhanced visualization tools and seamless workfl ows that help you and your team create in SketchUp. Create, iterate, and confi dently share complex projects with these quicker, smoother, and more powerful tools.
SketchUp offers a free 7-day trial of the Studio subscription offering which includes all the tools in the Studio ecosystem. Click HERE to download the SketchUp 2025 installer. When you install and start SketchUp 2025 you will be prompted to create and sing into a Trimble account to begin a 7-day trial.
If you have an active SketchUp subscription (Check your account HERE to find out), then you can update to the latest version free, click HERE to download the SketchUp 2025 installer. After running the installer, you should sign out of your current SketchUp version before starting and signing into SketchUp 2025.
If you do not have an active SketchUp subscription with the email you try to sign in with, you will be prompted to begin a 7-day trial.