The Top 75 FREE Extensions for SketchUp! (Updated for 2024!)

oh what's up guys Justin here with the SketchUp essentials.com all right so in this video we're going to talk about some of the top free extensions for SketchUp let's go ahead and just jump into it so if you do want to learn more about SketchUp extensions you can check out my Ultimate Guide to SketchUp extensions this is my complete list of SketchUp extensions that um I've worked with on the channel I've covered over 140 and I link to those extensions and also those tutorials so if you want to check it out you can go to the SketchUp essentials.com extensions but now we're going to talk about some free extensions and by the way I will link to all of these extensions in the notes below this video so you can find them most of them will be located in the SketchUp extension Warehouse or the sketchucation plug-in store ffd or free form deformation is a tool that allows you to take an object and create a control cage around the outside of it then you can adjust the control cage in order to deform the object this is a great tool for both twisting and also deforming objects directly inside of SketchUp this is a free extension from the guys over at mindsight Studios and you can find it in the SketchUp extension Warehouse so path copy is a tool in the SketchUp extension Warehouse from the smard team it allows you to take an object and copy it along a path by selecting the path running the tool and then selecting an object note that the object origin for each object is going to set the insertion point so you can move that origin in order to set where things are located on your path as well as the orientation a th1 bit tools is a free collection of architectural tools for SketchUp it has a number of different tools doing everything from um giving you the ability to fill it in champer edges to more complex architectural functions um some of my favorites include the ability to add grooves on a Surface so you can set number of groups you can set spacing and then you can select the base of the surface and it'll automatically add those groups it also has the ability to generate things like louvers just by selecting faces and the ability to create roofs from flat surfaces and to add detailed framing to those roofs really quickly so JHS power bar can be found in the sketchucation plug-in store it's a collection of some of the most powerful functions from a number of different extensions including things like giving you the ability to randomize rotation and scale drop objects to surfaces Place objects on points and more this is a large collection of useful tools for SketchUp so pipe along path is a free extension from TIG that you can find in the sketch eation plug-in store and so the way the pipe along path works is you can select a singular path run the tool and you can set the pipe to be generated with an outside or inside diameter if you want you can set number of segments as well as grouping but you can use this in order to quickly generate pipes along paths this is especially helpful if you have um surfaces or pipes that need to not be kind of flat because you don't have to do any kind of alignment or anything like that you can literally just run this tool and it's going to generate that path or that pipe for you but there's another tool from Didier Burr also in the sketch cation plug-in store called lines to tubes and what that does is that adds a menu item that lets you convert all of these to cylinders this will work on non-continuous paths meaning what's going to happen and I'm going to go ahead and make this a little bit bigger just so you can see it meaning what what's going to happen is this is going to generate a pipe along every one of these edges in here like this this one allows you to generate more tubes around a bunch of different edges in SketchUp Helix along curve is a tool in the SketchUp extension Warehouse from 3D Albert soft and it basically allows you to generate helixes along curves or edges and so you can set this to um have a smaller radius at the bottom or a larger radius at the top so for example I could set this to have a 24 in radius and a 12in radius but you can also set the number of laps that this makes as well as a number of other things about the way this is created but notice what this does is this basically creates a helix um along your path and so you can use this not only for simple lines like that but also for other lines like this so you can use this in order to quickly create spiraling and helical shapes in SketchUp multiple offsets is a tool from Sam d Mitch that allows you to repeat offsetting in a certain direction you can offset both outward and inward with your shapes allowing you to quickly create those multiple different offsets which you could then push pull or do whatever you want with the smart path select tool is a part of the sketch UV extension from mindsight studios in the SketchUp extension Warehouse it basically allows you to create complex selections by finding the shortest path between your points so you can click in order to set those selections and do complex selections really quickly I use this for most of my complex path Selections in SketchUp while we're on the topic of selections selection memory is an extension from TomTom in the SketchUp extension Warehouse that allows you to quickly recall previous selections just by tapping the D key so you can set it to a keyboard shortcut but it'll recall your previous selection so you can cycle between them so if you accident click off of something you can get it back without having to reselect it while we have a mesh here with a gaping hole in it soap skin and bubble is an extension in the SketchUp extension Warehouse that allows you to create surfaces from closed in borders so you can select the perimeter border of an object then use this to create a skin across that opening you can use this to patch holes and meshes create things like tensil structures and then I use it a lot for things like earthwork and site work in order to fill gaps around perimeters selection toys is a really interesting tool from TomTom in the SketchUp extension Warehouse that allows you to filter your selections you can use this in order to find things like the border of a selected object you can use it to select all components all groups as well as selecting things like hidden or soften geometry so if you wanted to select all of the Hidden geometry in an object and UNS soften it for example or unhide it this would be a great tool for that this is one of the best selection tools you can download shape Bender is a tool from Chris Fulmer that allows you to draw an object a Basel line and then a Target line and you can select that object and bend it along your target surface this is great for creating complex shapes I do recommend that you save your model before running this um just to be sure that the geometry you're creating isn't going to crash your model quad face tools is a tool set from TomTom in the SketchUp extension Warehouse for Quad modeling and SketchUp it contains a number of tools for doing anything from selecting loops and rings of different things as well as inserting geometry cleaning up triy geometry and analyzing your model to find ingon tries and quads so if you're looking to do quad face modeling this is a great free tool set that'll make that easier so animator is a tool from Fredo 6 that you can download from the sketchucation plug-in store it allows you to actually create moving animations inside of SketchUp animator has a number of different tools for allowing you to actually create objects that move in your SketchUp models so whether that's cars with turning Wheels opening doors or other moving geometry animator has a bunch of functions for them material replacer is a free tool from TomTom in the SketchUp extension Warehouse that allows you to quickly replace materials with other materials so we're going to use this studio and garage comp concept example model by Mike brestle and you can select a material and once you picked a material you can pick another material to replace it with and it'll replace all instances of that material in the whole model so this is a quick easy way to swap out materials inside of SketchUp so you've probably noticed that high resolution materials can really slow down SketchUp material resizer is a tool released from the SketchUp team in the SketchUp extension Warehouse that allows you to analyze the size of images that are being used in your models and make them smaller so if you have a large material you can reduce the resolution of that material in order to make the image size smaller note this does reduce the quality of the images so be a little bit careful with this one but it can be a massive performance help all right next up we've got one of my absolute favorite extensions also from TIG in the sketchucation plug-in store this tool is called Lattis maker and it's great for creating commercial style Windows it offsets the outside of faces and then allows you to set a material on the inside um as well as your offset depth things like that this is a great tool for creating not only singular windows but it also works at multiple faces at once so if you want to add um if you want to quickly ADD commercial style Windows to your models lattice maker is a great tool TIG also has an excellent extension for creating slices from your solid models and SketchUp slicer allows you to cut objects in One Direction or mult mple different directions by setting a thickness as well as the spacing between the different objects it can even take these slices and lay them flat for export to a CNC router so if you want to take a model and make it creatable or buildable in the real world you can check out slicer solid inspector is a free tool in the SketchUp extension Warehouse from TomTom that allows you to quickly find errors and make objects solids it can find anything from gaps near faces to internal faces and a lot more so sketchup's buil-in 3D text editor is a little bit Limited in the sense that once you create your text you can't change it luckily TomTom has a tool called the 3D text editor in the SketchUp extension Warehouse that allows you to create and edit that text once it's been created allowing you to change both the text and also the things like the size the Extrusion and more this is a vital tool if you want to work with 3D text and SketchUp when you're working with complex shapes and SketchUp textures don't always map properly with the native tools through paint is a free tool from Fredo 6 that you can download in the sketchucation plug-in store that allows you to set UV mapping of objects it has multiple ways that you can map materials and you can also live adjust the scale and the rotation of those textures on surfaces true Bend is another tool for bending objects this one is from TomTom it's in the SketchUp extension where house and it allows you to bend an object by a certain number of degrees one of the things that makes true Bend unique is it allows you to bend something in true 360° so if you want a continuous object that bends all the way around a circle this is a great fit if you've ever tried to extrude something using the follow me tool along a path that doesn't maintain a straight up and down orientation you might have run into issues with the object twisting Ino upright extruder is a tool in the SketchUp extension Warehouse that allows you to extrude an object along a path while maintaining its upright orientation this keeps your object from twisting when you extrude it so that you can get that true upright Extrusion roof by TIG is an extension that you can find in the sketchucation plug-in store that allows you to create different kinds of roofs from your surfaces this can create simple roofs like these or more complex roofs that turn Corners so so you can use this in order to create multiple different kinds of roofs really quickly and in a way where you can edit their slopes architectures is one of my favorite extensions for working with materials in SketchUp it's in the SketchUp extension store and has a free and a paid version but the free version allows you to create custom materials and import them into your SketchUp models so you can do this by changing the material but also by adding patterns to create things like pavers bricks and more the paid version also gives you the ability to generate bump maps that you can use in renderings floify is an awesome tool for deforming objects along complex surfaces you can use this to bend objects along different shapes as long as they both have four corners this works by generating a base shape and a Target shape and then you can use this in order to bend objects along those surfaces note you're probably going to want to use the soften edges tool in order to soften things once you've used this solar North is a free extension from the SketchUp team in the SketchUp extension Warehouse that allows you to set the north direction of your model when you set the north direction of your model your sunlight is going to adjust to aligned with that new North rotation so you can use this to take your models and place them in the proper location to look at the way the sun shines in your model if you want to get even more in depth on your sun analysis kuric Sun is a tool that lets you precisely calculate where the sun will be in the sky around a point in your model based on your geographic location and a time so if you want to do a more advanced Sun analysis check out kuric sun which you can find on kuri's website so aligning a bunch of objects in SketchUp can be timec consuming but kric align allows you to select multiple different objects and you can align them all together so notice how it creates a bounding box around your objects then you can click in order to set where they are aligned inside of the box so in this situation I could align them to the left side or the right side of the bounding box in order to quickly get objects aligned in my model in addition you can couple this with curic space curic space is a tool that's designed to help you set the spacing of objects so say I have these objects right here and I want to space them out evenly I can just click on this and I can space them in a line like this and notice how the spacing has been set so you can also then align the objects using curic align just like this so this can be a massive timesaver if you have a bunch of small objects like these in your model Edge tools is a tool from TomTom designed to help you clean up and simplify edges in your model this is especially helpful for things like CAD files you can download this from the SketchUp extension warehouse but it does things like helping you find gaps in your edges as well as simplifying lines and Contours to remove edges this can massively improve your Speed and Performance when it comes to larger models in SketchUp all right so fixing reversed faces in your model can be really frustrating I've got three tools here that can help you with that the first is the automatic face reverser from Didier Burr in the sketchucation extension store that one allows you to pick either a part of your screen or your whole model and then you can right click and run the view based face reverser and in this case you can scan the model or scan the screen region if it sets a region I can click and drag across this and it's going to automatically find and try to reverse faces based on your camera location so front face from Tomas basically allows you to paint and faces will get reversed to face your camera so notice how if I click on this I can click and drag over surfaces and notice what it's going to do is it's going to take anything that has that back face facing forward and it's going to flip it so I can paint across the surface like this in order to manually flip those surfaces really easy finally sometimes it's possible to have materials apply to the back side of faces but not to the front Tigs revers face tools give you gives you options to change this so you can do things like deleting materials that have been applied to the backs side of faces as well as merging those so the materials on the front sides and the back sides of your faces get copied to both sides of the object so that you don't just have back faces with materials so if you have a number of different objects that aren't grouped in your model there is a tool from Chris Fulmer in the SketchUp extension Warehouse that allow you to take that loose geometry so you can select it and it's called loose to groups and you can find it under Chris Fulmer tools but when you run it what is it what it's going to do is it's going to go find all that loose geometry and it's going to put it in different groups based on the separate faces that are in your model make fur is an extension from toada that's that allows you to create both fur and grass on surfaces as well as scattering objects you can find it in the sketch ofation plug-in store and what it does is it allows you to create and Scatter fur on surfaces in addition you can also pick a component that you designate and Scatter that across surfaces as well so modeling some kinds of shapes requires repeating transforms over and over again instead of doing this man manually there's a tool called memory copy that you can use in order to repeat transforms across components over and over again this can repeat movements rotations and scales of objects and is excellent for creating things like Spiral stairs and other objects that repeat the same Transformations so sometimes you've got a group of objects and you want to randomly perform some sort of action on them be that scaling or whatever else Ino random selection is a tool in the SketchUp extension warehouse and you can use this in order to adjust how many objects are in that selection as well as shuffling that selection I could use this in order to randomly color things or do a lot of different things randomly in my model while we're on the topic of randomization random tools is an excellent tool set of randomization tools from Alex shrier in the SketchUp extension Warehouse it allows you to do things like randomly Push Pull faces as well as randomly move vertices around in your model so this can be very helpful for terrains or creating piles of objects um very quickly curic reset rotation is a tool in the SketchUp extension Warehouse that can take objects and reset the rotation so they align with the global or local axes so if you have a bunch of objects that you need to realign with the global directions this could be a great tool for that compost spray is a tool from Didier burr from the sketchucation plug-in store that gives you multiple different ways to scatter objects on surfaces from picking a shape like a circle to using the spray function in order to spray an object down notice how objects inside of your model olude the spaces or the faces that you're spraying on this is an excellent tool for scattering things in your models scale by tools is a tool from Alex shrier that allows you to scale objects based on mathematical equations so you can use this in multiple different ways in order to create really interesting scaled groups of objects one of my favorite functions in this tool is the ability to Scale based on a photo image in your models split tools is a tool from TIG that gives you a number of tools for subdividing objects into quad geometry you can use this to not only subdivide flat faces but also objects which allows you to add geometric detail which then can get really interesting with tools like sandbox Tools in addition it also has the ability to split Rings into into quad geometry visu hole is a tool from freedo 6 that you can download from sketchucation that helps you punch holes and openings in walls it comes with a couple preset shapes but the real power is that you can create your own stencils and use them in order to create custom hole punches into 3D objects ma beam is a tool from Majid m in the SketchUp extension Warehouse that allows you to quickly create concrete beams in your models it allows you to customize things like the rebar as well as the size of the beams in your models in addition Majid also has a column tool called MH column that does something very similar but for columns if you have images you want to get into your model and used for 3D geometry you can check out bitmap to mesh this is a tool from TomTom that allows you to import different images and create meshes from them um so you can use height maps in order to create terrains or you can create G geometry using colors of a model inside of SketchUp this has some really interesting functions when it comes to terrain modeling component Stringer is a tool from Chris Fulmer that allows you to take objects and string them along edges so these objects get placed along the edges based on the object axes of the models so by changing the direction of the axes so in this case the blue axis towards the tip of the cone you can change the way the objects are strung along paths and while we're looking at Chris Fulmer's tools perpendicular face tools is a tool that can take shapes and place them perpendicularly along a path whether you want to do this using circles or squares or if you want to use a custom shape this can be an excellent tool for prepping objects to be extruded along a path in the case of things like base or other things like that if you're having trouble managing your component libraries you might check out comp component finder from Flex tools you can download this from the flex tools website but it's basically a tool for managing and importing your components quickly into SketchUp if you run into a situation where you need to place components on a number of faces in a SketchUp model quickly you might check out components onto faces from Chris Fulmer this tool allows you to select faces and objects and it'll Place those objects on those faces note that the object origin in each other object is going to affect where and how these objects are placed on your surfaces so this extension is one of my absolute favorites it's from kurick and you can download it from krick's website it's a tool that uses faces in SketchUp in order to cut or remove materials meaning you can use your faces in order to set where things like trim or sighing are um just by using them as a cutting Implement in your model this can be a massive timesaver for things like sighting when you try to navigate Interiors in SketchUp a lot of the time you can get stuck in walls curic Zoom through is a tool that automatically detects the walls and jumps you to the other side of the wall so that you don't get stuck in your interior models you can download this from kuri's website curvier is a tool found inside a Fredo 6's Fredo tools tool set basically what it does is it takes curves and it shears them up in order to create ramp shapes so you can use this to create create complex ramping shapes in SketchUp now since Fredo's curv aoft is now a paid extension if you're looking for a free option for skinning this you're probably going to want to try extrude tools from Tigs extrude edges by Loft in order to create those surfaces if you're looking for another good randomization tool random entity generator from Samuel tallet from sketchucation um is an excellent tool for scattering objects on surfaces basically the way that it works is you set the surface to be a randomization Zone and then you can adjust everything about the way that things are scattered on that surface note that this tool can create randomizations but also proxies for inscape for rendering while this tool does come built into SketchUp it is still an extension that you have to enable sandbox tools is sketchup's tool for creating terrains and other organic shapes and SketchUp it has the ability to create terrains based on Contours as well as tools for doing things like creating grids moving them up and down using the smooth tool and also draping and stamping objects onto surfaces in your 3D space if you're looking for a free tool for creating more complex curves you might try curv maker by Terry R in the SketchUp extension Warehouse while it's not as powerful as tools like bezier spline from Fredo 6 you can use it to create complex curves like these for free so if you're you're looking for a tool that allows you to create Spirals and other more complex curves you can check out curv maker taper maker is another excellent extension from Terry R also in the SketchUp extension Warehouse that allows you to take paths and create tapering shapes along them so you can set the paths to create a larger shape on one end and a smaller shape on the other end allowing you to create tapers in your SketchUp models if you have shapes that you want to unwrap into flat surfaces you might try unwrap and flatten from Alex shrier so this tool takes a shape and it tries to unwrap it so that the individual geometry of the object lays flat now the more complex your objects are um the more issues it's going to have with this which is not surprising but it does do a good job of trying to unwrap and flatten your objects M stair is another extension from Majid M who we talked about before that creates different styles of stairs in SketchUp you can use this in order to set your stairs based on number of risers and height and it's got four different styles of stairs that it can create so if you're looking for a tool to quickly generate stairs and SketchUp you might give Mash stair a try in addition Majid also has an extension for creating multiple different kinds of rails now this one has a free and a paid version I think the free version has three kinds of rails but you can use this in order to quickly generate rails um in multiple different ways in your models note this will also create those rails and um you can align them with your steps created by m stair so if you do any kind of construction work knowing how much of a certain material you have can be really valuable report on areas is a tool from Fredo 6 contained inside of this Fredo tools extension that'll give you a report of the area of materials in your model you can use this to figure out how much square footage you have of different kinds of materials it also allows you to do this by other units as well then you can also export these into a CSV file if you want to open them up in Excel so in addition sometimes you want to look at different material options in your SketchUp models matte SIM from fred6 in the sketchucation plug-in store allows you to set up different color themes by doing that you can set up different materials and look at the differences between those different materials set UPS just by clicking between the themes so if you want to look at options in your models check out Matt Sim by Fredo 6 so sometimes you have a series of materials that you want to reuse over and over again inro material extractor is a tool that basically extracts the materials from your model and creates kind of a series of swatches as its own separate SketchUp model you can then export that or import that into a future model and you can sample those materials and quickly apply them to your models in SketchUp so if you want to export a series of material swatches that you can reuse over and over again check out in off material extractor fracture by TIG is a tool you can find in the sketchucation plug-in store for fracturing objects in SketchUp you can adjust things like number of iterations and kind of fractures in order to fracture your solid objects into multiple shapes when working with SketchUp models and especially 3D Warehouse models having individual G geometry get placed on a tag so that it toggles on and off can be really problematic default layer geometry from TIG is a tool that will take all of the raw geometry in your model and place it on that default or untagged tag so you can use that in order to take your whole model or a selection and untag the individual geometry so that you don't have that issue one of the more confusing omissions from SketchUp is that it doesn't have a tool set for creating geometric shapes like cones and spheres other things like that draw parametric shapes from John mclanahan solves this issue by giving you a large list of geometric shapes that you can quickly add using inputs in your SketchUp models so if you want to add these geometric Primitives you can do that using this tool if you want to quickly create Windows in your SketchUp models you can check out threo window from pixo in the sketchucation plug-in store this is definitely a tool for creating quick Windows basically what it does is it creates a window based on three points that you set now one of the things you're going to have to do is you're going to have to move it into the wall and cut the holes manually um using the rectangle tool and probably the push pull tool but this does allow you to quickly generate simple Windows in your SketchUp models so in addition pixo also has a tool which can generate some two-dimensional window dressings so things like blinds and plants just by drawing those three points on top of that surface it's obviously something for use in the background um but it is something that can increase your speed if you are looking to do that Mages is a tool from Zhao Z in the SketchUp extension Warehouse that generates building shapes really quickly from geometric shapes that you place in your model so if you create a bunch of squares like this one it can go through and it can make them look like buildings with a single click or a couple clicks SketchUp diffusion is the tool that sketch SK up released in order to allow you to create AI renderings directly inside of SketchUp basically you take your objects you type in a prompt and then you can generate multiple different images in different styles using that prompt so by coupling it with extensions like Mages basically what you can do is you can really quickly create conceptual renderings note that most of the typical limitations to AI apply meaning that once the images are created you can't iterate or anything like that at least in the current version model bloat can be a real issue that can slow down your performance and SketchUp luckily cleanup 3 is a tool or I guess it's cleanup cubed is a tool from TomTom in the SketchUp extension Warehouse that can go through and it could do things like purging unused geometry deleting unneeded geometry and a lot more so if those model files have started getting really big on you and really slow you might try using Cleanup in order to try to fix it note that I usually try to save my model before I run any kind of clean up so if you have to create a lot of custom materials and SketchUp from images this can get a little bit timec consuming luckily there's a great tool in the SketchUp extension Warehouse called SK material browser basically what it does is it allows you to find or dictate a folder and then within that folder it'll find all the image files and you can use this in order to create a material just by clicking on them and then clicking in your model note that you can adjust things like the scale and rotation of the model directly inside of SK material browser if you need to generate any kind of cloth in your SketchUp models cloth works from Anton s is something that you can check out in the sketch cation plug-in store clothworks has both a free and a paid version but the free version does allow you to subdivide surfaces as well as doing cloth simulations directly inside of SketchUp so if you want to drape cloth over objects or do other things like that you can do that using this tool note this simulation is live meaning you can click and drag and move the cloth around as it simulates so if you've ever tried creating moving animations in SketchUp by animating the transition between different section Cuts you know that this can be a little bit challenging um luckily there's a tool called animate sections from how to Su in the SketchUp extension Warehouse that can automate this process so it can automatically create animations of objects moving up and down you can also set a vector in there to set a different direction for the section cuts to move that those planes may not come in there perfect but you can go in there and adjust them and it's really easy to create these section animations all right so that is a lot of extensions I have tutorials for most of them Linked In My ultimate guide to SketchUp extensions I will link to that on this page I'll also link to all the extensions in the notes down below but leave a comment below let me know what you thought as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this and I'll catch you in the next video thanks guys

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Keywords: thesketchupessentials, the sketchup essentials, thesketchupessentials.com, sketchup tutorials, sketchup lessons, sketchup modeling, architecture, sketchup 2017, sketchup tutorial, justin geis, sketchup, sketchup 2021, sketchup 2020, sketchup extensions, sketchup free extensions, free sketchup extensions

Id: KMz5bn8yzdU

Length: 33min 25sec (2005 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 20 2024