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Generate Textures

With Generate Textures, SketchUp can help you create Physically Based Rendering (PBR) texture maps for materials that don’t have them. With the help of AI, SketchUp will analyze your material and create corresponding texture maps for Metalness, Roughness, Normal, and Ambient Occlusion.

Last updated 17 July 2026

With Generate Textures, SketchUp can help you create Physically Based Rendering (PBR) texture maps for materials that don’t have them. With the help of AI, SketchUp will analyze your material and create corresponding texture maps for Metalness, Roughness, Normal, and Ambient Occlusion.

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To generate texture maps for a material:

  1. Open the Materials panel and find the material you want to enhance or Sample ( icon-sample.png ) the material in your model.
  2. In the Edit tab, a preview of the material appears with Generate Textures ( icon-generate-textures.png ) in the lower right.
  3. Click the icon to begin texture generation. This can take a few seconds.
  4. Once SketchUp assigns the material texture maps, the preview will change to a cube. A gold sparkle symbol will appear on the cube to show that Generate Textures feature was used.

After generating textures you can adjust the material’s appearance by editing the metalness, roughness, normal, or ambient occlusion values.

3D Printing a Model

Before you print a model on a 3D printer, you need to make sure your 3D printer can understand your model data. Here's a quick overview of how to set up your SketchUp model for 3D printing:

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Adding an Environment to a Model

Environments allow you to add 360°panoramic backgrounds and image-based lighting conditions to your SketchUp models. The Environments panel is where you can add and manipulate environments, or import High Dynamic Range Image (HDRI) files or OpenEXR files to create a new environment.

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Adding Attributes

Attributes make components dynamic by telling SketchUp what to do. You can choose from predefined attributes or create custom attributes:

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Adding Premade Components and Dynamic Components

Components in SketchUp turn geometry in a model into reusable entities. For example, most buildings have at least one door and window. Instead of modeling these common objects, you can insert a component that you have already made, or even one made by someone else.Like all geometry in SketchUp, a component is still

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Adding Text, Labels, and Dimensions to a Model

In SketchUp, you can add four types of text:

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Still need help?

Technical support from our New Zealand team is available to customers with a current Procadsys SketchUp Pro Plus or SketchUp Studio Plus subscription. Self-help articles are public.

Contact SketchUp support