The full cycle — from SketchUp model to client-ready walkthrough video — used to require a render farm, a separate rendering application, and hours of waiting. The current workflow with Maquete takes under 15 minutes of active time once the model exists. Most of that time is choosing which lighting preset looks right.
Here's the complete step-by-step, with realistic timing at each stage.
What you need
- SketchUp (any version — the plugin works across versions)
- A Maquete account (free to start at maquete.ai)
- The Maquete SketchUp plugin, installed from the Extension Warehouse
That's everything. No GPU requirements, no secondary application, no file management. The rendering happens on Maquete's cloud servers.
Step 1: Model for rendering
How you model affects render quality. A few habits make a meaningful difference:
Clean geometry. Reversed faces produce dark patches in renders. Stray edges and floating geometry create conditioning noise that the AI has to work around. Run a cleanup before rendering — the SketchUp plugin CleanUp³ handles most issues automatically.
Material naming. Give your materials meaningful names in SketchUp. "Concrete_floor_polished" renders better than "Material1" because the material name is part of the conditioning input. You don't need to write paragraphs — just give each material a clear descriptive name.
Placeholder furniture. If you're rendering an occupied space and haven't modelled furniture yet, consider adding simple box volumes where furniture should go. A 2.5m × 0.9m × 0.45m box on the floor tells the AI "this is where the sofa is" without requiring you to model the sofa. It prevents hallucinated furniture appearing in positions you haven't designed for.
Camera as scene. Set your camera angle as a named scene in SketchUp (View > Animation > Add Scene). This makes it easy to return to the same view and ensures the render is from a deliberate camera position rather than wherever the model was last orbited to.
Reasonable view depth. A camera angle that captures the full depth of the space works better than one pressed very close to a single surface. Aim for a view that shows enough spatial context for the AI to understand the geometry.
Step 2: Render from the plugin
Open the Maquete panel in SketchUp (Extensions > Maquete). The panel shows your current viewport as the conditioning input.
Select your style preset. The style presets correspond to project types: residential interior, commercial interior, exterior, and others. Selecting the right category biases the AI toward the relevant visual register — residential interiors get warmer, more domestic-feeling outputs; commercial gets cleaner, more functional outputs.
Select your lighting preset. This is the most impactful single choice. For residential warmth, golden hour. For material accuracy, overcast. For luxury/hospitality mood, blue hour. You'll often want to render two or three variations of the same scene to give the client options.
Specify materials (optional). If you want specific materials that differ from your SketchUp model's appearance, enter them in the material fields. "Wide-plank white oak floor" or "honed Bianco Carrara marble" produce more precise outputs than relying on the SketchUp material colours alone.
Click render. The current viewport is sent to Maquete's servers. The render appears in your Maquete dashboard in approximately 30 seconds.
Step 3: Iterate and refine
The first render is rarely the final one. The iteration cycle is fast enough to treat renders as drafts.
Try a different lighting preset. The same geometry in overcast vs golden hour tells a completely different story. Render two or three lighting conditions for important scenes — clients often choose differently than you'd expect, and giving them options improves sign-off speed.
Adjust material specificity. If the floor material looks generic, add more specific material names and re-render. "Oak floor" → "wide-plank white oak, 200mm boards, matte finish" will produce a noticeably different result in approximately 30 seconds.
Use the enhance tool. If a render is close but lacks detail in a specific area, the enhance function runs a second pass focused on improving material and surface quality. This adds another ~30 seconds and often resolves ambiguous surface quality in the first output.
Inpainting for specific fixes. If one element in an otherwise good render is wrong — a chair that looks off, a ceiling detail that didn't render correctly — use inpainting to mask and re-generate only that area. The rest of the render is preserved.
A typical iteration cycle for a single scene: 4–6 renders across 3–5 minutes of actual wait time. Most of the time you're looking at results, not waiting for them.
Step 4: Generate a walkthrough video
Once you have an approved still from a scene, the walkthrough video takes approximately 4–5 minutes to generate.
In your Maquete dashboard, select the render you want to use as the basis for the video. Choose the walkthrough option. The video options include movement type (steady approach, orbital, dolly through the space) and duration. Select style if you want the video to differ from the still — same lighting preset is usually the right choice for consistency.
The video renders on Maquete's servers and is available in your dashboard as an MP4. Download it directly or include it in the client share link alongside the stills.
For a full project with 5 rooms × 2 lighting conditions each, plus a walkthrough video per room: 10 renders at ~30 seconds each (5 minutes total) + 5 videos at ~5 minutes each (25 minutes) = approximately 30 minutes of generation time for a complete client package.
Step 5: Share with the client
Create a share link from your project dashboard. The share link gives the client a clean gallery view of all stills and videos associated with the project. No download required, no account required on the client's side — they open the link in any browser.
Clients leave comments inline, pinned to specific renders. You receive a notification when comments are added. You can respond in the dashboard, mark comments as resolved, and track what feedback has been addressed.
This replaces the most painful part of the traditional render review cycle: email threads with attached files, version confusion ("which is the latest one?"), feedback scattered across messages, and the inevitable "can you send it again, the file was too large?" The share link is a single URL that always shows the current state of the project.
The total time
Realistic timing for a complete single-room presentation:
| Stage | Active time | Wait time | |---|---|---| | Model cleanup | 10 min | — | | First render | 2 min | 30 sec | | Iteration (5 renders) | 10 min | 3 min | | Video generation | 2 min | 5 min | | Share link setup | 3 min | — | | Total | 27 min | ~9 min |
Everything after modelling — first render through share link — is under 30 minutes for a single room. A complete 5-room presentation with variations and video takes 2–3 hours of active time.
Tips for consistently better results
Get the camera angle right before you render. The camera position is the hardest thing to fix after the fact. Set your SketchUp scene at the right height (1.5m for interiors, slightly elevated for exteriors), with a wide enough view to show the spatial context.
Name your materials. Even simple descriptive names make a significant difference. The material name is part of the AI conditioning — it's not just metadata.
Render two lighting conditions per key scene. Always. Golden hour and overcast for interiors, or golden hour and blue hour. The 60 extra seconds produces a choice that gives you and your client something to talk about, and the conversation almost always improves the final output.
Don't over-prompt. More instructions in the material and style fields doesn't always mean better results. Specific material names work better than long descriptive sentences. Let the architecture-specific conditioning do the work — it's been tuned for this.
Use placeholder geometry for furniture. If the space is empty and supposed to be furnished, simple bounding boxes are much better than either nothing (AI hallucinates) or not acknowledging the furniture at all.
Can I render directly from SketchUp? Yes — the Maquete plugin renders directly from your current SketchUp viewport with one click. Install from the SketchUp Extension Warehouse, open the Maquete panel, and click render. The result appears in your dashboard in ~30 seconds.
How do I generate a walkthrough video from a render? In your Maquete dashboard, select a render, choose the walkthrough option, select movement type and duration. The video generates in approximately 4–5 minutes and downloads as MP4. No additional software required.
How long does a SketchUp AI render take? Approximately 30 seconds from clicking render to result in your dashboard. This is consistent regardless of scene complexity — rendering happens on Maquete's cloud servers, not your local hardware.
How do I share renders with clients for feedback? From your Maquete project, create a share link. Send the URL to your client — they see all stills and videos in a clean gallery view, leave inline comments without an account, and you receive notifications when feedback is added. No file attachments, no email threads.