Seeking technical consultation on utilizing the SketchUp C API

Developers SketchUp SDK
1

Hello,

We are building software solutions for an interior design firm. Our primary use case is to leverage our existing multimodal AI/LLM infrastructure to perform advanced analysis—such as automated Bill of Materials (BOM) generation, detailed volume/area takeoffs, and design compliance checks—from the source .skp files.

Since our LLM can process structured text (JSON, XML, CSV), we need a robust, programmatic method to efficiently read the .skp file data, traverse the model hierarchy (Groups, Components, Entities), and extract all associated metadata and geometry into a structured text format for batch processing outside of the SketchUp application.

We believe the SketchUp C API (SDK) is the correct tool for this standalone application. Could you please confirm if the C API is fully capable of this deep, hierarchical data extraction, especially for accessing component definitions, materials, and custom attributes? Furthermore, can you advise on the best direct point of contact for enterprise-level technical consultation and licensing for a product like this?

Thank you for your guidance.

2

Yes, CAPI sdk is the correct solution, you can open/parse/extract any data from skp file.

Try to contact @CraigTrickett or @thomthom1

3

First step is to apply to be a developer:

Second is to download the latest SDK and examine the projects in the samples folder.
There is an example of exporting data to XML in this folder.

5

I believe it is very capable if you need to read or extract data. As soon as you also want to create SKP files, it gets more tricky.