Author: Charlotte Lee

Project type: Affordable housing for low-income families

Location: Washington D.C., USA

Building program: Residential

Floor area/stories /occupancy: 2 x blocks of 6 housing units

Performance goal: Net-zero energy

Navigating project limitations

Inscape Publico had designed and specified the building blocks but wanted to understand their performance and optimize the project where possible. The project needed to juggle a limited budget, a limited palette of building materials, and a tight project timeline. Using Sefaira analysis enabled the team to optimize the changeable factors within the project and demonstrate that the project was on track to achieve net-zero energy.

Sketchup Origins

Sketchup pro version history is impressive. The origins of the Sketchup 3D modeling tool lie with a company called @Last Software, a start-up co-founded way back in 1999 by Brad Schell and Joe Esch in the town of Boulder, Colorado. They created their general purpose 3D modelling software in the year 2000, an unusually versatile yet simple 3D content creation tool they imagined would prove vital for design professionals. And they hit the nail on the head – their innovative 3D modeling program won a Community Choice Award at its first trade show in 2000 and has gone from strength to strength ever since.

Now, more than two decades later, Sketchup enjoys a place at the top of the cad software heap. It’s widely used by  the architectural, interior design, landscape architecture, civil and mechanical engineering, film and video game design sectors and is popular right across the world. It’s available in web-based app form, as SketchUp Free, and as the added-functionality professional version, SketchUp Pro. As time passes and tech moves on, it has been frequently updated to include extra drawing layout functionality and surface rendering in a myriad of different styles, and you can even place the models you make in Sketchup into Google Earth.

Google Acquisition

In March 2006 Google bought @Last Software, impressed by their acquisition’s innovative work on a Google Earth plugin. And in early 2007 Google announced the arrival of something called Google SketchUp 6. This 3D modeling program was free to download and came with a suite of integrated tools to allow content to be uploaded to Google Earth as well as to the search giant’s 3D Warehouse. Google SketchUp Pro 6 soon followed, incorporating a beta version of Google SketchUp LayOut including clever 2D vector tools and popular page layout tools. All this meant it was possible for users to create presentations without a separate program to present them. Everything was driven by Sketchup, and it worked a treat.

The 3D modeling program software became more popular as time passed, and late 2008 saw SketchUp 7 released, integrating SketchUp’s Component Browser with Google 3D Warehouse, LayOut , and a variety of dynamic components designed to respond beautifully to scaling. And the 2010 version, V8, came along in autumn 2010, incorporating model geolocation with Google Maps and Building Maker integration.

Trimble Acquisition

In the spring of 2012 Google sold Sketchup to Trimble Navigation, now called Trimble Inc. In 2013, SketchUp 2013 came out, along with a smart new website plus a huge warehouse of extensions and plugins to support the software. Sketchup had well and truly arrived on the design scene and was making waves everywhere it was used, a truly impressive tool that did more than most, did it faster, more easily and more professionally. It has kept on developing ever since, always up to date, always secure, and always packed with brilliant functionality.

CAD Software Features for Interior Designers

There’s clearly a large choice of 3d interior design software options, each with its own focus and intention. But some of the features you need are absolutely essential, providing the very best cad software for interior design. ‘Must have’ cad features include advanced functionality, a generous 3D model library, versatile importing, and hyper-realistic rendering. You’ll need the facility to share projects, and it’s great to be able to view your final designs via Virtual Reality software, the ultimate in client presentation tools. Last but far from least, the cad package you choose must be easy to learn, simple to use, and intuitive every step of the way. All this is exactly what Sketchup will do for you.

Advanced CAD Functionality

What does advanced cad functionality involve? This refers to capabilities like drawing floor plans and creating flexible 3D spaces. You’ll want to be able to easily and quickly design various standard architectural features including half walls, columns, sloped ceilings and a large number of architectural features, and you won’t want any limitations on the interior design features. You want it all, and you deserve it all! It’s also important to make sure your chosen interior design software programs support the design of entire buildings with multiple rooms – not just one room at a time. It’s good to know that Sketchup Pro fully supports these features and many more.

Readily Available 3D Model Library

Imagine this. You need a certain type of chair or settee. No problem at all – you simply navigate to the software’s resources bank and there it is, waiting for you, just one of thousands of choices, all available instantly and many based on actual products you can buy in the shops. The same goes for materials, allowing you to change the materials you use in an instant. You also have access to a vast array of different floor coverings, plus as many different design accessories as you can possibly imagine. Sketchup comes with a huge repository of models, all stored in the easy-to-search Sketchup 3D Warehouse. With a resource like this behind you, creativity and versatility are never an issue.   

Versatile Import Capability

You need a suite of import features that allow you to import images and CAD designs into a project. Sketchup supports this capability, letting you import a wide range of items including arcs and circles, entities with a thickness, faces and 3d faces, lines and supported line styles, materials, nested blocks, splines, raster images and more.

You’ll want to import and export image files and STL files for 3D printing, import and export COLLADA files and import DEM files for Terrain. Importing and exporting 3DS files and exporting FBX, KMZ, OBJ, VRML, and XSI files, it’s all important for flexibility and creativity. Sketchup lets you do all this and more.

Photo-Realistic Rendering

Obviously the better your photorealistic renderings, the more your interior design springs into life. This is one of the most exciting and satisfying features of the best interior design software. Sketchup is excellent for creating engaging 3D design renderings, delivering images that will convince, inspire and excite your clients, helping them make informed decisions based on hyper-real imagery.

Virtual Reality

The best interior design CAD packages not only enable the creation of photorealistic renderings – they also support generating wholly immersive virtual reality images and experiences. These can be viewed via a VR headset and are loved for bringing an interior design to life in a way that an ordinary drawing just can’t achieve. It’s incredibly real, making it easy for you and your client to explore every aspect of the space virtually, feel the atmosphere, understand the exact ways the light falls in the space, and much more. Again, Sketchup provides this capability, one of the many reasons interior designers find it hard to resist.

Project Sharing

You’ll want to be able to share your models easily and quickly during the design process, another way to delight your clients. Sketchup makes sharing a dream. All you do is use the cloud-based platform Trimble Connect to view, share, and access your models anywhere, any time. Sketchup comes with a brilliant Trimble Connect Extension designed to make all this super-simple, and it’s included in SketchUp Pro as well as accessible via your desktop, mobile, or a web app. SketchUp Shop users benefit from a Trimble Connect Business account, included in the deal. You can also transfer your .skp files via a USB or use any number of popular file transfer systems with ease, yet another big benefit of Sketchup.

Easy to Learn

You’re busy, your clients want quick results, and once this project is complete there’s another, and another, and another… no wonder it’s so important for interior designers to be able to get up to speed with a cad package as quickly as possible. When there’s no time for a steep learning curve, you need something intuitive, user-friendly and easy to grasp, and for that you need a wide range of readily available, actionable training resources  and tutorials. There’s a thrilling abundance of excellent tuition and guidance available for Sketchup Pro users, and while it’s a fully featured CAD software package, it’s also surprisingly easy and fun to learn.

The kitchen sits right at the heart of every home, and it’s really important to get the design absolutely right. If you’re researching how to design a kitchen with Sketchup, this article reveals everything you need to know about Sketchup kitchen design. It’s amazing what Sketchup for kitchen design can achieve in a short time, making the creative process a real pleasure as well as simple and intuitive. Read on for insight into Sketchup kitchen cabinet creation, kitchen render expertise and more.

Is Sketchup Good for Kitchen Design?

Let’s look into Sketchup for kitchen design. Plenty of kitchen designers use specialised kitchen design software to create their designs. The main benefit of this is you get access to extensive catalogues of essential kitchen elements. But Sketchup is an unusually powerful interior design tool that can be easily used to create wonderful kitchen designs of every type, including the chance to use a vast range of materials and finishes, astonishingly real lighting, and a truly vast library of resources available from the 3D warehouse. There’s also a huge choice of simple-to-follow Sketchup kitchen design tutorial resources as well as a number of very cool Sketchup kitchen plugins specifically for kitchen design.

Sketchup Kitchen Design Plugins

Sketchup extensions that can be used for kitchen design include EasySketch, Cabmaker32, and SketchThis. EasySketch is perfect for creating professional kitchens quickly, and it’s simple to learn and use. It’s popular with kitchen designers and architects, interior designers and home remodelers. Cabmaker32 offers metric and imperial cabinet templates, working with Sketchup to create fully 3D cabinet layouts and ideal for frameless and face frame construction. SketchThis is a popular kitchen design plugin that you pay for, costing $6.95 per week or $9.99 a month. All these extensions make kitchen design in Sketchup easy and fun, which means you can relax, enjoy the process, and be your creative best.

You’re wondering how to add light in Sketchup. It’s a great way to add life, excitement and realism to your views. This guide tells you everything you need to know about lighting in Sketchup, your definitive reference point for everything to do with Sketchup lighting.

Lighting in Sketchup

You can easily add lighting to your Sketchup models to create realistic interior and exterior views, and there’s so much variety. Interior light in Sketchup represents all sorts of interior lighting so accurately it’s completely natural-looking. You can light a drawing using different colours, and rendering lets you achieve the most amazing realistic shadows. The same goes for exterior Sketchup lighting, simulating a huge variety of light including sunlight. The shadows are realistic, the reflections look real, and the whole thing comes to sparkling life to the delight of your clients. So how does Sketchup achieve all this magic? There’s a variety of Sketchup Extensions that enable the modeling of light sources. 

Sketchup Rendering Plugins

Superb lighting in Sketchup is yours thanks to many excellent rendering extensions and plugins for Sketchup. IRender nXt is an all-singing, all-dancing renderer that’s brilliant for creating all sorts of wonderfully photorealistic renderings. ArielVision does it without the hassle of complicated settings, great for fast work. Raylectron is quick, powerful and affordable. There’s ShaderLight and Thea, RENDERLights and Brighter3D, and that’s just for a start. When you render both the interior and exterior views of a model using light sources to create photorealistic images you easily achieve everything from stunningly real natural sunlight to spotlights, central lights, directional lights, and more. The potential is infinite.

Lighting an Exterior Day Scene with V-Ray

V-Ray is a very popular extension for lighting in sketchup. It’s perfect for creating a photo-realistic exterior daytime view of a model. Once you’ve installed it, simply use the V-Ray asset editor to adjust your render settings. The materials are initially overridden so the exterior lighting contribution is the focus. Open the ‘lights’ tab and you see that sunlight is added by default. When you click on the ‘sunlight’ source you get a menu where you choose various sun related parameters to set, things like colour, intensity, size, and more. These settings influence the blurriness of shadows as well as the sun’s appearance in your rendered reflections. When you disable the sunlight, it turns off.

You can pick an alternative light source, for example a dome light, to create the effect you want, and this also comes with a suite of parameters of its own. You might, for example, want to increase the light’s intensity to brighten up your rendered image. Then there’s HDRI or High Dynamic Range Imaging, used to create even more detail in both shadows and highlights. As you can imagine, experimenting with the various parameters along with dome light rotation produces remarkably realistic renderings, and that means your clients find the output you deliver truly inspiring.

Interior lighting in SketchUp – best practices

So what are the key best practices involved in modeling interior light in sketchup with the Enscape Sketchup extension? First, bear in mind how real-time rendering in Enscape won’t process unlimited light sources. The number and intensity of your chosen light sources will affect performance, especially if your lights overlap.

You can add all sorts of light types: spotlights and sphere lights, rectangular lights, disk lights and linear lights. And once you’ve added the Sketchup lighting attributes, you can play with and adjust them. It’s important not to put any of the light sources directly onto the surface of the geometry, but just before it. Setting it directly on the surface means your light could be obscured by the geometry.

With spotlights, changing the cone angle controls how much of the scene is illuminated. The cone’s width dictates the hardness or softness of the light. The sphere light sends light in all directions equally, giving you lighting that feels very like an ordinary incandescent bulb. Rectangular and disk lights are both area lights, emitting light across their surfaces uniformly to create soft, subtle lighting. Linear lights are like fluorescent tube lighting, scalable by length only and letting you choose the luminous intensity.  

It’s also possible to copy and paste sources of light in sketchup. While the lights are always on in Enscape, it can look as though some of them have turned off during the day. But that’s not the case – the intensity of the sunlight has simply dimmed the other emitting lights. As you can see there are limitless ways to define and combine light sources with Enscape and the best thing of all is the fact that it’s so simple, which also means it’s fun. There’s no complexity involved.

Place lights just in front of your geometry using the super-simple 2-Click system. Duplicate identical lights by simply copying and pasting. Edit a light by double clicking it. If you don’t like what you’ve done, use the ESC key to reject it. You can use native SketchUp tools to rotate or move your lights, and the paint bucket tool is where you add colour. Simple!