3D Printing with SketchUp

For hobbyists in agriculture, mechanics, or DIY engineering, 3D printing opens endless possibilities to innovate, repair, and build—right from home.

Imagine you can easily create custom components and parts tailored to a specific need—whether for agricultural projects, machinery repairs, or DIY innovations. Or as a marketer, you can design your own prototype and bring your idea to life!

🔹 Affordable Prototyping – Traditional manufacturing can be costly for small-scale projects. Whether you want to design an award with unique shapes or plan on launching limited-edition toys, 3D printing allows for complete creative freedom—no need for large production runs or expensive molds.

🔹 Agro-Tech Innovations – Hobby farmers and engineers can create custom nozzles for irrigation, seed planters, animal feeders, or even enclosures for weather sensors—fully tailored to their unique setup.

🔹 Custom Parts on Demand – Instead of searching for hard-to-find or expensive replacement parts, now you can design and print their own. Need a specialized gear for your farming tool or a mount for your sensors?  With 3D printing, you can produce custom casings for motors, brackets, or irrigation components without expensive tooling or bulk orders.

How does one get started?

We love finding inspiration from 3D Warehouse, the world’s largest 3D model library. Here you will find millions of pre-made 3D models that works seamlessly with SketchUp. 3D Warehouse is a tremendous resource and online community for anyone who creates or uses 3D models.

Before you print a model on a 3D printer, you need to make sure your 3D printer can understand your model data. Your model needs to have a volume. For example, if you want to print a box that's hollow in the middle, the faces along the outside of the box need to have a thickness, as shown in the following figure.

• Make sure your model is a solid group. With your group or component selected, choose Window > Entity Info. If your model is a solid group, the Entity Info window tells you so in the upper left (see above). If your group or component isn't solid, download and install the Solid Inspector 2 extension via SketchUp's Extension Warehouse. (In SketchUp, select Window > Extension Warehouse, search for the extension, and click the red Install button.) This extension helps you analyze why your model isn't solid and repair and holes or issues. For example, if your model contains internal geometry, then your model is not a solid.

  
  

• Check that the fronts of faces point outward. (And thus, the backs of faces need to face inward.) Technically, making sure all your faces are oriented the correct way is called checking the normals. To check that the face fronts point outward in SketchUp, select View > Face Style > Monochrome to see whether the back sides of a any faces point outward. By default, the face fronts are white and face backs are dark gray. To reverse a face, context-click it and select Reverse Faces.

  
  
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• Orient your model so that the 3D printer has a base on which to build your model. Your 3D printer prints your model one layer at a time. If your model juts out at the top, the 3D printer has nothing to build upon. For example, if you want to 3D-print a gear, rather than orient the gear vertically, place the gear on its side, as shown in the following figure.

After you check that your model is ready to be 3D printed, you need to output your model to a format your 3D printer understands, also known as the STL format.

Exporting a SketchUp model as an STL File

1. Select File > Export > 3D Model. The Export Model dialog box appears.

2. Navigate to the location where you want to save your exported file.

3. (Optional) In the appropriate text box, type a name for the exported STL file.

   • Windows Only - From the Save As Type drop-down list, select STereolithography File (.stl).

   • MacOS Only- From the Format drop-down list, select STereolithography File (.stl).

4. (Optional) Click the Options button, and in the STL Export Options dialog box, select your desired options for the exported STL file. (See the following list for details about each option.) Click OK when you're done.

5. Back in the Export Model dialog box, click Export. SketchUp exports your model to the STL format and saves the file in the location you specified.

The STL Export Options dialog box enables you to choose a few options for how SketchUp renders your exported file:

• Export Only Current Selection: When you select this checkbox, SketchUp exports only the selected geometry to the STL file. This option is helpful if you want to model several parts that fit together in one SketchUp model file, but export each part to a separate 3D-printable STL file.

• File Format: By default, Binary is selected from the drop-down list. The other format option is ASCII. The binary format is generally preferred because this format helps reduce the size of an STL file.

• Swap YZ Coordinates: By default, this checkbox is cleared. If you select it, the Y axis becomes the vertical axis instead of the Z axis.

• STL Units: By default, the STL file is exported using the same units specified in the model. (To check your model's default units, select Window > Model Info and, in the Model Info window, click Units in the sidebar on the left.) You can change the units in the exported STL file to meters, centimeters, millimeters, feet, or inches.