Exporting as 2D Shapes

I know the very basics of Sketchup… Spent a weekend learning 2017 free version to make an Arcade Cabinet. Been over a year and finally decided to build it. Did some edits this weekend and now looking to see how much wood is needed.

I’d like to be able to lay out all the panels onto 4’x8’ rectangle and see how best to cut up the sheet of wood to save on waste.

Is there a way to do this? If it was sent for cnc, how do they do it? If I could get everything onto a single sheet I’d look into paying someone to cnc it for me.

You could lay the parts out flat. The exact method will depend on how you modeled the parts in the first place. If you want more than just an image showing the parts laid out flat, maybe for CNC cutting, you’ll want a vector export like DXF or DWG which would require SketchUp Pro or Shop. There are CNC applications such as some from Vectric that can import a SketchUp model and do the laying out automatically. Might be worth investigating.

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One or more of the CutList extensions from the Extension Warehouse attempt to lay out sheet parts as you describe, but only as an image or pdf.

Try either or both of CutList 4 or OpenCutList to see if the optimisation is good enough.

Or do it manually, as DaveR describes.