From BIM to SketchUp: A Real-World Guide to Moving from Revit to SketchUp

Setting the Scene: Transition

So, you’ve come a long way with your favourite software: Revit. You know every shortcut, every workaround, and your team has been cruising through BIM models like a well-oiled machine. Then, everything changes.

Maybe it’s a shift in leadership, a tighter budget, or new team members with different strengths. Suddenly, your office is pivoting away from Revit, toward SketchUp, paired with V-Ray or D5 Render. All you can think about is the efficiency nosedive you’re about to face. Your team is unfamiliar with the new tools, and projects are piling up. Meanwhile, your financial director is absolutely beaming, because licensing costs just dropped dramatically.

Sound familiar?

You’re not alone. We’ve been there, and we’ve helped teams through this exact situation. The truth is: change is uncomfortable, especially when it feels forced. But with the right strategy, patience, and leadership, this transition can become an opportunity to rebuild your team’s workflow in a way that’s not just cheaper, but more agile and creative in the long run.

A change of mindset

If firing up SketchUp for the first time feels like trying to speak Italian when you’ve only ever spoken German, you're not wrong.

SketchUp and Revit were built by different teams, at different times, with very different philosophies in mind. Revit is a BIM-first tool: structured, data-heavy, and procedural. SketchUp is a design-first tool: flexible, visual, and fast. They serve different needs, and shifting between them isn’t just about learning where the buttons are. It’s about adjusting your perspective on modelling altogether.

That doesn’t mean you need to deep-dive into Trimble’s corporate mission or study their UX rationale, but it does help to acknowledge that you're switching ecosystems, not just programs. Your team isn’t starting from scratch, but they are shifting mindsets — from documentation-led design to design-led documentation.

Encourage them to stay curious. Keep the mood light. Mistakes will happen. But over time, the speed and freedom SketchUp offers — especially for early-stage design — can be truly liberating.

Hardware

With every software switch comes a set of technical assumptions — and SketchUp, while light on the surface, can demand a lot under the hood when paired with D5 Render or V-Ray.

One of the biggest traps we see during transitions is assuming that SketchUp is “lighter” than Revit and will run better on older machines. That’s only half true.

While SketchUp’s core modelling is relatively lightweight, real-time rendering (with D5) and GPU-based ray tracing (with V-Ray) will expose ageing hardware very quickly. Many firms discover this too late, when the render crashes or the viewport slows to a crawl.

Tip: Segment your team. Let modelers use the older machines with basic upgrades (like SSDs or more RAM), but invest in 1–2 powerful workstations or laptops with modern GPUs (RTX 3060 or higher) for rendering. Let those become shared resources if needed. Cloud rendering is also a good bridge.

Hardware is not the place to cut corners during this transition, not if you want your team to stay motivated and meet deadlines.

Software

Losing Revit means giving up automation, parametric families, and deep BIM data, but what you gain in SketchUp is speed, flexibility, and creative control.

Your team can sketch quickly, experiment more, and move at the pace of design again. Combined with D5 or V-Ray, the quality of visuals can rival or even surpass what you had in 3ds Max, often with less setup and shorter render times.

If you're worried about documentation and schedules, don’t be. With the right plugins (like PlusSpec, Condoc Tools, or 5D+), SketchUp can handle a surprising amount of documentation for small-to-medium projects. It’s not Revit, and that’s okay. Let SketchUp do what it does best.

Where to from now

Start small. Choose one project: ideally, a short-term, design-focused one, and use it as your test bed for the new workflow. Let the team get their hands dirty in SketchUp and build confidence incrementally.

At the same time, start building your new ecosystem:

• Establish your asset libraries (materials, components, templates)

• Set naming conventions and export workflows

• Train your renderers on D5 or V-Ray best practices

• Identify who needs hardware upgrades (and who doesn’t)

Remember: this transition isn’t just about swapping tools, it’s about reshaping how your team works, communicates, and delivers value to clients.

With a bit of upfront effort and leadership, your team will not only survive this shift, they’ll likely thrive on the other side of it.

Need help planning the transition? At Studio JDB, we’ve helped several teams move from Revit-based pipelines to SketchUp + D5/V-Ray environments with clarity and confidence. If you're considering the shift and want to minimise disruption, reach out. We’re happy to share templates, hardware plans, and more. Contact us here.