I have received and uploaded SKP2026. Annoyingly, all my toolbars or menus have been wiped out and I have to start all over from scratch - boo hoo.
Is it possible to customize the Layout toolbar - move the icons to positions that suit my habits?
Stephen
Every major release is installed as a new software, at least you can import your plugins from the versions you have installed on your machine but the customized toolbars wonāt migrate sadly. Thereās a plugin called lord of the toolbars that lets you create customized toolbars and export them, the problem I have with this plugin on windows is that it doesnāt dock like the regular toolbars or the ones created with toolbar editor.
When I first started with SketchUp, I knew basically nothing about construction. I had helped to fill in screw holes in drywall and make cuts and measurements on sheet metal for pole barns. But then someone wanted us to build a whole house, and it was decided that we shouldnāt design it on a napkin. So the main builder and I got to work designing it on the computer, and then (with the help of Medeek BIM) we had a whole house and it passed all inspections far above their requirements structurally. Now I have a new job, I started as their truck driver, managing a small warehouse and moving whatever tools and materials I could fit on a ram 5500 flat bed, but they moved me into the real office as a Project Manager in a 50m dollar 09A scope commercial construction company. I have to wonder knowing what I know now: how many people use SketchUp in a substantial way that has an impact in the residential market, designing and documenting a whole custom house from scratch from beginning to end? Where does it impact the commercial industry? Iāve seen some perspective shots on the cover page of some of our drawings that looked like it was made in SU, but thatās about it. I know, itās not like I see everywhere SU is used by a long shot. But itās a common theme on the forum (in regard to commercial use) and very evident in my conversations with other companiesā employees, they donāt even know what SketchUp is.
I feel like itās hanging on because it has a strong community more than it is a real contender in the market.
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And Medeek nails it.
Revit is a BIM tool that large corporate stakeholders use for massive data processing and documentation. Not going away any time soon.
Rhino is a commonly used tool in that same office because around the world parametric design is THE design style. If you watch multi-floor designs, this is all you see. I can look out my window in Dubai here and see 15 different buildings under construction that I can confidently say were done in Revit for BIM/Documents and Rhino for design development. SketchUp might have been part of initial volume studies, AI as well, but after that Rhino/AI takes over for full development and the pipeline leads to Revit.
No one is changing this and SketchUp will never be on par with these two tools to navigate that market. I donāt think Trimble cares to try either. SketchUp is already crippled in that market. It is a toy to that office culture and always will be. It cannot natively do anything those tools can do. And learning curve is meaningless there because money can pay for that curve steepness.
That said, that market is only one segment of the professional design community.
There are many other segments of professional users that will never need that workflow.
And SketchUp has been poised on the edge of owning those segments for nearly 2 decades but in my opinion continues to try to serve the Corporate/Revit marketplace instead of making the bold assertion that they are THE tool for anyone NOT in that marketplace.
Why does chief architect exist in the first place? Because Google didnāt care about documentation. And so far, it seems that Trimble doesnāt care either. Shoot, Justin did a review of the latest 2D app that can import .skp files. Does anyone in Wheatridge see the competition is getting closer?
I know, we proās can get great drawings out of LayOut. I get my own compliments. But if we want to try to automate the process as Medeek has said; if we want to get automated dims; if we want instant drawing and page creation; if we want automated schedules (without the round tripping to Excel) populated from our data in the model, we ultimately have to hack our way to it or give up.
This is the failure of SketchUp in my opinion. After 10 years of people asking for a LayOut API, still none exists. There isnāt even a native SketchUp panel that that uses the current LayOut API in any meaningful way to automate drawings. There isnāt a developed native way to build/automate dimensions in the model file. There isnāt a native/intuitive method for text handling in SketchUp either. 3D text is tedious. So are leader texts. If SketchUp doesnāt care to develop a LayOut API for an open LayOut document, develop the SketchUp connection.
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Totally agree. @mikebrightman said something similar on his 2026 review. Demand forced use of the EW and Trimble then needs to have curation of best tools for certain segments. Packages that everyone knows are proven.
And Im totally onboard with Trimble buying out plugins that should be native tools. Make the developers rich and get it over with.
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Thanks for your reply, I suppose this old dogās gonna have to learn new tricks - with each new release.
Stephen
Thereās still time!
There is definitely forward progress. Itās just not anything we need for our workflow.
We explored using FormIt for massing studies and conceptual building design because it has a simple toolset Architects can master quickly and you can move data between Revit and SketchUp without too much pain. We punted because Autodesk has abandoned FormIt.
Thereās an opportunity here. Do you see it Trimble?
Why demand forced used of the Extension Warehouse. I donāt agree with that statement at all as a major extension developer. The problem is you canāt easily fit everyone into the same shoe box. For example I have a number of licensing options (permanent, subscription, lifetime) as well as various military, educational and other discounts for select users with all of my extensions. I highly doubt that the simplistic licensing system built into the EW could handle all of this and I donāt even want to wade into those waters right now. If it isnāt broken, donāt try to fix it.
The extension ecosystem is not the problem, and honestly SketchUp itself is not the problem and never has been. If SketchUp was the problem we wouldnāt even be having this conversation right now, we would all be using different drawing and modeling programs, SketchUp would have died and blown away long ago.
The problem is Layout and the lack of a usable real time API for Layout. Make Layout a bit more robust, focus more energy on its improvement rather than these silly side quests like SketchUp for Ipad etcā¦ or even the web based version of SketchUp. The core money making product is DESKTOP SketchUp and Layout, that is where the focus needs to be and that is where the focus should be. I have been saying this now for at least six or seven years, maybe longer, and I am not afraid to keep saying it.
As you indicated in your longer post the Revit market or Revit compatible projects are certainly here to stay as are the software products that support them. Large industrial and commercial projects are ridiculously complex and tracking things to the utmost degree is crucial. Data processing and documention to the nth degree is something that marries well with Revit and other such data heavy products, we canāt expect SketchUp to fill that niche. However, SketchUp fills another market, the residential and light commercial market. Using Revit for a typical 3,000 sqft house design would be overkill and cumbersome to say the least. That is why I am not overly concerned or interested in IFC in SketchUp, it really doesnāt serve the core architectural users of the platform. To be honest, I have never used or even seen IFC used in residential construction, maybe I am too old school, I donāt know.
This is why I am more concerned about products like Chief Architect. They compete with SketchUp in the residential market, where its core user base resides. Also you need to look at the numbers game here. How many people are designing residential structures and how many people are designing skyscrapers? For every 100 residential designers there is probably one high end architect designing the next Trump tower. It is simply a matter of volume, focus on the the 90% the other 10% matter but not so much. Residential architecture is where it is at for SketchUp, it seems to fit this niche very nicely, lets protect and gatekeep this space from all other ursurpers.
On a different note I am not against SketchUp buying out certain plugins that they find particularly useful and deem that they should become part of the core SketchUp offering. It is a conversation worth having.
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Exactly.
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I didnāt agree with that part of the video either. Can it be confusing sometimes? Sure. But is the extension warehouse flexible enough to offer options for all the different licensing types? Doesnāt seem like it.
Looking at the comments of the original video (which I think is the most comments Iāve ever had on a video), SketchUp itself does appear to be a part of the problem. A LOT of people are stating they left the program due to its lackluster toolset. The only options for users that get beyond the beginner stage in SketchUp are (A) Utilize a ton of external extensions to add tools most programs already have or (B) Find another software. Iām not talking about things like the Medeek Toolset - Iām talking about simple things, like beveling, alignment and spacing, curves, and adjusting materials on curved faces.
In the early 2000ās, a simplified toolset made a ton of sense - most of the options out there were not user friendly, and the overall marketplace of 3D users wasnāt super educated in how to use 3D tools in general. However, itās 2025 now. There are a ton of options available for all kinds of modeling, most of which have more robust toolsets than SketchUp, and there are a whole lot of people asking that SketchUp be able to do more.
I would be interested to see what options this would open up, because I donāt see how extensions for Layout would fix the underlying issues. Youād still be in a separate software, youād still be relying on viewports, raster and vector rendering to get data into Layout itself, etc. Maybe there are some devs out there with great ideas on how to work around the base functionality?
What issues specifically do you think external Devs would be able to fix?
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I totally agree with the substance of Justinās video: the pipeline of folks from undergraduate and graduate architecture programs in the US are overwhelmingly using Rhino for schematic design and design development. I find exactly this when we go to hire folks for our design and build firm; almost none of the graduates used Sketchup except for the very beginning of their design education or in high school; they consider it a toy.
I can say, as someone who was in a Masters in Architecture program back in the late aughts, the market for 3D programs was there for the taking. The legacy program at the time was 3D Studio Max which everyone hated and folks were experimenting with SketchUp and Rhino. I think Rhino won out because of the toolset and grasshopper and the (in many ways stupid) emphasis on formal novelty and parametric fetishization in the architectural education world. But I do think Sketchup couldāve become far more relevant and gotten a larger piece of that share had they improved the toolset, improved parametric components earlier, etc. I realize a lot of this happened because corporate ownership of the product changed hands multiple times and much of this directional decision making was out of the hands of the developers.
For us it does mean folks learning a new tool if we want them to adapt to our workflow and software set and that is a real overhead cost. I think the ship has sailed on getting a large share of the undergraduate/graduate market to adopt SketchUp unfortunately. But I do think Justinās suggestions to make more powerful versions of Sketchup available to more folks early in their education will dislodge the notion that Sketchup is just a ātoyā.
As an aside I would love to see an integrated suite of BIM style tools (wall, floor, roof plugins, door/window plugins) into a SketchUp package targeted at architectural design. It would create some level of standardization between offices and practices and make Sketchup more of a program worth learning for smaller offices and folks who cycle between them. Thanks for making the video Justin I think it comes from a great place!
I agree, a few more additions to the basic toolset would be welcomed by all, myself included. When it comes to a few more basic tools within SketchUp my feature requests would be:
1.) Bevel tool (fillets, chamfers)
2.) Simplification tool like Skimp
3.) Mirror tool, I think we have that now.
4.) Real curves, (but this may require a complete rewrite of Sketchup and literally break everything.)
5.) A few more options with the dimension tool (ie. angle dimensions)
I am sure there are other more important or pressing things but that is what comes to mind off the top right now. However none of these specifically are deal breakers for me, I think the most inconvenient is the lack of a bevel tool, but there are of course extensions for that.
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The Rhino mentioned in this thread has support for face, quad and NURBS geometry inside a single package. The different geometry types have their own separate toolsets and commands to convert between them. Quads was the latest addition while the rest of the application remained the same.
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This was me fresh out of architecture school when a friend said they wanted an extension to their house done. I knew next to nothing about construction (yes, that is architectural education in the UK), so I used Sketchup to model the whole construction. Just so I would be able to have the conversation with confidence with builders. This was before the days of LayOut, btw.
I continue to do small scale domestic projects, and I use Sketchup and LayOut from concept through to Construction Drawings (old article here: Tom Kaneko Design & Architecture | SketchUp Blog | Trimble Resource Center ).
I think parametric modelling and Grasshopper is a cool thing, and you can make fantastic shapes if you are a high end architecture firm. BUT, for those who are closer to real construction, you realise that 99.9% of building materials are straight. And if you want curves, youāll have to pay 4x more to manufacture. Iāve come to understand that if something is easy to model (in SketchUp), then it is likely easy to build (in real life). With that approach, Iāve become quite popular with builders for the buildability of my designs and how I communicate them (the clients wouldnāt know how much money Iāve saved them).
That said, as computer-aided manufacture (CAM, CNC) is getting more accessible, the paradigm above has its limits.
ā¦But I do agree with much of what Justin is saying:
- educational usage is so important. To add further - I am a Sketchup developer and scripter, and I first started out scripting on the free desktop versions of Sketchup back in 2006/7. There is now no free version of SketchUp Desktop where young people can have a go at scripting in SketchUp, and there hasnāt been for many years. I think as a result, there are fewer young developers who are coming through to develop extensions on SketchUp. This is something that will only be felt in the future, but I think would be disastrous considering the diversity of characters who made SketchUp what it is today.
- SketchUp does not work well with information (BIM). And I understand that this is a block to āproduction useā in some practices. What is so frustrating from this developer/user point of view is that the foundations for good information is all there, under the hood. Itās the UI to leverage information modelling, which is lacking.
- LayOut development seems to have stalled for several years. I really want Trimble to go on a big development drive to make LayOut into a production machine that architects get won over by. A Ruby API for LayOut like we have for SketchUp would help free it. I input all information about construction into my LayOut document currently. I donāt see why we might model in SketchUp but put information into the model through LayOut. But we canāt do this currently.
From my perspective, I want Sketchup to go further on the information and production side, rather than the modelling side (which is hard to improve on).
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Iām worried that development of new software is going to outpace SU into digital extinction.
Iāve appreciated the engine upgrades, how smooth it runs, (when itās not spontaneously shitting the bed) and the visualization functions like PBR materials and ambient occlusion. The updates to location and aerial imagery are nice too.
But there has been very little in the way of tools that make modeling and organizing objects easier or quicker since I first installed v2021 (except tag folders 
). It doesnāt do much more than it did 5 years ago in that regard, and that worries me.
Iām not a super modeler or anything, and I can contribute a lot of these issues to my lack of skill and my background, but without Medeekās tools, I probably wouldnāt use this software. I always have to model the entire structure with all of its parts to make sure it will actually work, and often, I have to put on tool bags and literally take part in building the thing myself.
Before, when I was modeling every stud as a component and making a dozen uniques of all the pieces, I was quickly filled with the anxiety of "oh hell nah ā¦ " Every change that would need to happen, just moving a wall or window, even slightly, was the promise of high blood pressure and a late night at the laptop.
Idk, Iām kind of rambling at this point. I wish they would put there effort into making it easier to do construction things that a large portion of its base is involved with. It feels like Trimble isnāt sure who their software is for, and in the pursuit of making it free form and reliant on extensions to cater to the wide variety of domains that use it, it has sacrificed its very identity. It was once a plain 3D modeling tool, but its been designed to produce drawings for years.
Bottom line: in my opinion, they donāt have their priorities straight in regard to development. Idk if the problem is, but Iām firm that it will remain an obscurity in the market until something drastically changes.
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I think you got it right when you said this. I think Sketchup has allowed extensions to plug the gaps for basic modelling functions when they should be for the specialist use cases and specific industries.
No matter what you use Sketchup for ultimately you are here to create a 3D model what you later do with that model is what the extensions are (should be) for.
You can always introduce sketchup to your (new) boss 
I hadnāt thought of this, but youāre 100% right. Youād have to pay to get a version of SketchUp to develop on in the first place. Very good point
I meanā¦itās not hard to improve on the current modeling offering. There are multiple low hanging fruit examples that seem like theyād be easy enough to target without ever having to get into a complex BIM option that changes the way everything in the program works
I think itās hard when youāre a 3D modeling program that was created around the idea of making 3D modeling accessible to everyone to really niche down. Thatās a legitimate issue to me. That said, the landscape has changed, and there are a lot of fairly accessible 3D programs - I would hope in the future SketchUp can at least try to match those programs for basic tools
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I agree, it really wouldnāt be hard just to add in the basic functions to help model like chamfers etc.
Also who the hell is using the new collaboration feature?ā¦ I use SketchUp for 3D printing and for construction modelling for major projects. When I share my models in a Teams meeting with contractors or suppliers, they are all surprised, as no one uses it. Iām a project engineer and can operate as a silo for my needs at the moment, but if my scheme is getting bigger, I will have to drop SU, and Revit will be needed.
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Justin, you are a good sport. Kudos to you.
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