How to convert your SketchUp model into an interactive browser walkthrough

You spent four weeks on the SketchUp model. The plan is clean, the elevations are tight, and you exported a few rendered angles you are quietly proud of. You walk into the meeting and your client opens the PDF on her phone, scrolls past the renders in eleven seconds, and asks the question every architect has heard a thousand times: "but what will it actually look like to walk in?"

The answer she wants is not another rendered angle. It is a walkthrough — first-person, the camera in her hand, the kitchen wherever she chooses to look. This guide is about how to give her exactly that, starting from the SketchUp file you already have.

Why "just send the SketchUp" does not work

The most common workaround is sending the .skp file or a Trimble Connect link. It almost works. Your client downloads SketchUp Viewer, fights the orbit controls, gets stuck under the floor, and gives up. Even if she gets it open, she sees a model — not a space. There is no time-of-day lighting, no furniture, no sense of scale. The model your client sees is not the room you designed. It is a wireframe of it.

Trimble's web viewer is a step better, but it is built for collaborators reviewing geometry, not for clients trying to feel the space. The lighting is generic, there is no first-person camera, and the link looks like an internal CAD tool, which is exactly what it is.

What residential clients want is closer to a video game level: walk forward, look around, the lights are on, the furniture is in the rooms, the windows look out at something. That is what an interactive walkthrough delivers, and it is what the rest of this guide is about.

The five-step workflow

This is the workflow Brickrat is built around, and the same shape applies to any tool in this category — Shapespark, Enscape's web export, or one of the WebGL viewers. The principles are the same; the friction is different.

1. Clean the SketchUp model

The single biggest cause of a bad walkthrough is a heavy model. SketchUp tolerates a lot of mess that a real-time renderer does not. Before you bake anything, do three things:

• Purge unused components and materials. Window → Model Info → Statistics → Purge Unused. A residential .skp routinely drops 30–60% in size from this single step.
• Remove imported high-poly furniture. That sofa you downloaded from 3D Warehouse with 80,000 polygons is going to tank the bake. Replace it with a lighter version inside Brickrat (or your tool of choice) at the dressing stage.
• Check your scale. Right-click any face → Entity Info → confirm dimensions read in mm or feet, not in arbitrary units. A model imported at the wrong scale will load fine in SketchUp but render at the wrong size in any web walkthrough.

If the model has more than about 1.5 million edges after purging, expect a slow bake. Aim lower.

2. Place lights for the time of day the client meets in

Lighting is the single thing that separates "a model" from "a space". Most architects skip it because SketchUp's native lighting is poor and most renderers want you to learn a whole secondary skill set.

The shortcut: pick the time of day the client will see the walkthrough — usually evening or morning — and place lights to match. Sunlight through the east-facing windows in the morning, ceiling lights warm and low in the evening. Two or three lights per room is enough. The goal is not photorealism; it is legibility of mood.

3. Drop in the furniture from the brief

You do not need to model every item. You need enough furniture to give your client a sense of scale: a sofa in the living room, a bed in the master, a dining table where the dining is. The brain fills in the rest.

If your tool ships a furniture library, use it. If it does not, drag in the lightest 3D Warehouse models you can find. The point is mass and scale, not branded-furniture realism. Save the IKEA-catalog accuracy for the brief that needs it.

4. Bake the lighting and ship the walkthrough

This is the step that turns the editable model into a fast-loading, optimised web scene. Baking pre-computes how light bounces around the room so the browser does not have to. Bake times for a typical residential model run from a few minutes to an hour depending on resolution and machine.

Bake at the lowest acceptable resolution for your first pass. You can re-bake at higher quality once the client has signed off on the layout. There is no point burning two hours on a high-res bake of a layout the client will ask you to change tomorrow.

5. Share the link

This is the part that makes the entire workflow worth it. The output is a URL. You paste it into the WhatsApp thread, the email, or the Notion brief. Your client opens it on her phone. No app store, no plugin, no account, no SketchUp Viewer download.

She drags a finger to look around. She taps to walk forward. She walks into the master bedroom, looks at the window, looks at the ceiling, looks at the corridor she will use every morning. The conversation that comes back is not "I cannot picture it." It is "what if we move this here?"

Three things that will go wrong on your first walkthrough

The bake takes forever. Almost always a model-cleanup problem. Purge again, remove the high-poly imports, retry. A clean residential model bakes in well under an hour on a recent laptop.

The textures look washed out on the client's phone. Most often a baked-lighting brightness issue. Place a couple of soft fill lights and re-bake. Phones are darker than your monitor.

The client clicks the link and lands inside a wall. The starting camera is somewhere it should not be. Set an explicit start position before baking — usually just inside the front door looking down the entry hall.

What to do with the link in the actual meeting

The temptation is to project the walkthrough on the meeting room TV and steer it for the client. Resist it. The whole point is that they steer it. Send the link to their phone before the meeting starts. Let them scroll through their own house while you talk through the layout. The conversation gets better in two ways: questions get more specific because they can see what they are asking about, and emotional buy-in goes up because they have been in the space, not just seen it.

For more on the workflow itself, see the SketchUp integration page and the features deep-dive. For a longer explanation of what an interactive walkthrough actually is and how it differs from a rendered video, the walkthrough definition page covers it.

The point of all of this is simple. You already have the SketchUp file. The client already has a phone. The five steps above turn one into a link the other can open. That is the entire game.