What is LayOut?

LayOut is an additional application that comes with SketchUp Pro. It allows you to create professional presentations of your SketchUp Pro models in no time. With LayOut, you can place SketchUp Pro models in multiple views on a template (e.g. your house style) and add graphical elements such as titles, arrows, pattern fills, logos and photos for printing or screen presentations. So you can have a professional presentation document in no time or captivate your customers with a beautiful screen presentation!

See the bottom of the page for some examples.

Creating documents in LayOut

LayOut is packed with tools and features to help you create high-quality documents and presentations from your SketchUp models.

To give your document visual appeal and organize elements on each page, you can draw lines and shapes using shape tools that work in the same, but not exactly the same way as SketchUp's drawing tools. The main difference is that in SketchUp you draw in three dimensions, while in LayOut you only draw in two.

When you want to select a colour for a line, shape or other element, LayOut's colour picker gives you several ways to select a colour, including a colour wheel and RGB or HSB sliders. Choosing colours explains all the ways you can select color in LayOut's colour picker.

LayOut lets you perform all basic operations, such as copy, paste, delete and more. You also have several ways to view your presentation and manage and navigate all the pages in a LayOut document.

Tip: One of LayOut's most powerful features is its ability to insert SketchUp models into a document. LayOut allows you to navigate or slide around the model to change how your model looks in the document. Even better, if you need to make updates to your model in SketchUp, LayOut allows you to update the model references so that your LayOut document reflects your model updates - without having to do any extra work!

Besides SketchUp models, you can also insert images, such as a company logo or other branding.

Text often emphasises important information that you want your audience to extract from a document. In LayOut, you can add text, labels and dimensions using tools similar to those in SketchUp.

To organise elements in your document, LayOut lets you move, arrange and scale entities. You can also group entities or individual elements on different layers.

LayOut has several features that let you reuse settings and content that you use repeatedly. Styles lets you save and apply settings to elements with a single click. Scrapbooks let you save elements, such as a specific arrow style you want to use consistently across all presentations, in one convenient place. Templates store document settings, titles or other elements that you use in many or all of your presentations.