Skip to main content

Sharpening up SketchUp for Web

Sharpening up SketchUp for Web

If you work in SketchUp for Web, you may have already noticed that many of the improvements in SketchUp Pro this year rolled right into its sibling web modeler.  For instance, you can now create groups from scratch and access control point grips in both versions of SketchUp. (ICYMI: here are the improvements we made in SketchUp Pro 2020 and SketchUp Pro 2020.1)!

But, that’s not all... in SketchUp for Web (and SketchUp for Schools), we are still exploring the possibilities of a web-enabled SketchUp. In particular, we are interested in how to make SketchUp more learnable and user friendly. Here’s a closer look at a few recent improvements: 

Customized shortcuts: Shortcuts aren’t a new idea; neither is customizing them. But we’ve noticed that learning and personalizing shortcuts seem to make everything a little bit easier in SketchUp. So, we decided to try and make it a bit easier to discover shortcuts and make new ones.

Search tool in SketchUp for Web

Now, using the Search tool in SketchUp for Web, you’ll be able to assign custom shortcuts — which also means reassigning the default shortcuts if you don’t like them. These shortcuts will not only allow you to speed up your design process in SketchUp, but we think they will also help you discover your own, personalized workflows. 

Improved 3D Warehouse discoverability: Using 3D Warehouse and SketchUp together is pretty important. After all, you really don’t need to model everything from scratch.  We’re happy to share that you can now search 3D Warehouse from within SketchUp for Web.  Even better, you can access models you’ve added to favorites and folders… or curate models while you’re searching. We hope you end up using 3D Warehouse a LOT more while you’re working in SketchUp for Web. 

Search tool in SketchUp for Web

Revision history: If you’ve been 3D modeling for more than a few days, you know that sometimes things go wrong with your models. In desktop versions of SketchUp, there is only one back-up file of a file, but because SketchUp for Web uses Trimble Connect as a file system, there is actually a full revision history of every significant update to your model.

SketchUp for Web

This year, we incorporated this revision history directly into SketchUp for Web, so that you can look-up the revision history of your models, review older revisions, save them as copies, or even restore a project to an older version. This means you can recover old files that might have been (accidentally) deleted or edited over, or double-back to a simpler version of a model to rescue yourself from unintended consequences of your creativity. 

(Big) side note: We heard your feedback and took our Search tool to another level...11 to be exact. We localized Search in 11 new languages. As a reminder, Search helps you find and activate SketchUp commands that you remember and also those you might not remember or don’t even know about yet. To localize Search, we worked with 3D modeling experts all over the world to incorporate translated modeling concepts into our index. If you’re reading this post with Google Translate, we hope you’ll find that Search works just a little better than that. 

As always, we’ll be listening to your feedback in the SketchUp forums. Happy Sketching!

About the Author

A product manager on the SketchUp team, Mark is also an avid Colorado outdoorsman. You’re likely to find him roaming Boulder's mountain bike trails, scaring up marmots, pikas, and black bears.

Profile Photo of Mark Harrison