I’m an interior designer working mostly in SketchUp, and one of the biggest bottlenecks I run into is bringing real-world furniture into my projects. The 3D Warehouse is great for basics, but when I need specific brand pieces (or anything vintage/unique), I usually end up modeling from scratch or finding a placeholder from the warehouse. It works, but it’s not exactly time-friendly.
Out of that frustration, I’ve been building a small extension called FORM3D. The idea is simple: paste a product link, and it generates a 3D model you can drop right into SketchUp. It’s still early days (we’re launching next week after some fixes), but I wanted to ask:
How do you handle this challenge right now? Do you model everything, rely on manufacturer files, or have found another workflow?
I’d really value hearing how other designers approach this, and whether something like FORM3D would actually be useful in your workflow.
Sure thing, the basic idea is: paste a furniture product link → FORM3D extracts the product data and generates a SketchUp component you can drop straight into your model.
Here’s a quick example:
Copy the product link you want to create a 3d model with: the “W/S Stone” Armchair from 1stDibs
Result in SketchUp: FORM3D generates the 3D model directly from that product link, ready to drop into a scene. Models and product links are also added to a library tab for easy access.
It’s not meant to be a fully detailed manufacturer CAD file, but it gives you a fast, workable model of real-world furniture without having to build everything from scratch.
Happy to share more examples if that would be useful!
This one definitely came in on the heavy side! This is just the first version of our extension, and we’ll be focusing a lot on optimizing the models to make them as light and efficient as possible.
So far we haven’t run into big issues on our own setups, though I know that can vary depending on someone’s graphics card and system. Really appreciate you pointing it out though.. it’s super helpful as we keep improving
From experience, the trouble with physically small but edge-heavy objects like that is that people tend to put a bunch of them into a model. The bloat accumulates…
The high entity count in this chair model along with the excessive nesting would make me avoid this particular component for my projects. I think it could be simplified a great deal but I would not want to have to do that cleanup manually. I think it would be faster to model it from scratch in this case.
If your extension will do that simplication up front, you’ll really have something.
That’s really helpful feedback, thank you! You’re right, the current version has a high entity count.
On our end we can tweak parameters like mesh simplify, sampling steps, and texture size to reduce edge density and lighten the models. Optimizing the models so they’re lightweight and ready to drop into projects is a big focus for us going forward. Really appreciate you highlighting this, it gives us a clear target to work on!
Maybe another thing you can address is the location of the component’s origin. Since it is the insertion point when inserting it, the location should probably be at the bottom so the thing isn’t placed below floor level.
The current origin point isn’t ideal, and it makes sense to set it at the bottom so components drop in cleanly at floor level.
We can definitely adjust this in the pipeline for the next version update, and it’s something we’ll focus on as part of improving usability alongside optimizing edges and simplifying the geometry.
Small details like this make a big difference to the workflow, so I really appreciate you pointing it out
I’ve been working with the team to optimize the parameters and ran the same product again. I’d really appreciate your feedback on this updated .skp file, especially around the edge count, nesting, and overall usability.
I would be very interested to follow your journey as you continually improve the extension. This would be extremely useful for me, a fellow interior designer, particularly for furniture and lighting specifications for a whole home - would save me hours of work! You asked how I currently handle this: usually manufacturer files or modelling myself, however I have been trialing Archsynth, which is still a bit clunky and isn’t always able to properly convert images into 3D models.
all this makes me think of the up ! extension that had been presented at adebeo’s paris sketchup event. They have a similar ai generation service, but also a very large library. you should have a look !
How do you handle this challenge right now? Do you model everything, rely on manufacturer files, or have found another workflow?
