Import SketchUp into Revit: materials, families, Revit LT

You spent a week getting the finishes right in SketchUp, you bring the model into Revit, and everything arrives as flat gray blocks that refuse to be cut in section. By the end of this article the model sits in your project with materials you control, a category that behaves, and a route to swap it for a new version without rebuilding anything.

Cleaning the model in SketchUp decides what Revit can do with it.

The import itself takes three clicks. Everything that determines whether it works happens before those clicks, which is exactly the order almost nobody follows. Push a bloated model straight across and you get a bloated pile of faces back.

Work through this list in SketchUp first:

• Delete what Revit will never show. Entourage, vehicles, planting and the inside of closed cabinets all add weight and give you nothing in a construction model.
• Fix reversed faces. A blue back face is easy to ignore in SketchUp and becomes a dull patch in Revit that you cannot address separately.
• Run Purge Unused from the statistics in Model Info so old components, materials and tags do not travel with the file.
• Never scale a whole component with the Scale tool. Autodesk warns that groups or components scaled in their entirety with the SketchUp scaling tool can arrive in Revit at the wrong size.
• Move the model to the origin. Geometry sitting far from zero in SketchUp lands equally far from the family origin in Revit, and you will hunt for it in empty space.

One more habit worth building: sort your geometry by material before you leave SketchUp. That single decision determines how much control you have over the model's appearance later, for reasons that become obvious a few sections down. Settle the question of components versus groups in SketchUp first as well, because it carries straight through into the Revit family.

The old trick of saving the file down to an earlier SketchUp release is no longer the fix it once was. Trimble states that saving .skp files to older, unsupported versions is no longer available, and that the format is both forward and backward compatible across supported versions (saving a model on help.sketchup.com, checked on 8 August 2026). If the import fails, look at the geometry rather than the version number.

Import the SKP into a family, not straight into the project.

Autodesk's own instruction is short: create a family, import the SKP file into that family, then load the family into the project. It sounds like an extra step. It is the step that saves you later.

You have two ways to make that family:

• An in-place family built inside the project. Quick, but it stays locked to that one project file.
• A loadable family built in the Family Editor and saved as its own .rfa file. This is the one you want almost every time.

The payoff is concrete. When a revised SketchUp model lands in your inbox, you open the family, delete the old import, import the new file and reload the family. Every placed instance updates and your views stay intact. If the Family Editor is still unfamiliar territory, read how a Revit family is put together before you go further.

There is a cost, and Autodesk states it plainly: geometry imported into a family cannot be exploded, non-uniform scaling behaves better in families than in projects, and energy analysis may not work with families that contain imported SketchUp geometry. Only that last point genuinely hurts, and only if you run analysis on the model.

The import runs through the Insert tab, the Import panel and Import CAD.

Here is the sequence, with the settings Autodesk recommends for SKP files:

1. Create the family in the Family Editor, or start an in-place family in the project.
2. Click the Insert tab and find Import CAD on the Import panel.
3. Set Files of type to SKP in the Import CAD Formats dialog and browse to your file.
4. Set the import options along the bottom of the same dialog before you commit.
5. Click Open and wait for Revit to finish reading the file.

Insert > Import > Import CAD
Files of type: SKP

If nothing appears afterwards, that is normal rather than broken. Switch to a 3D view, set the visual style to Shaded and use ZF to zoom to fit. Autodesk lists those same recovery steps, along with setting the work plane and, for a mass family, turning on Show Mass Form and Floors.

Colors survive the trip into Revit, textures do not.

This is the question most people are actually asking when they search for importing SketchUp into Revit with materials, so here is the honest answer. Set Colors to Preserve and your SketchUp colors come across recognizably. Texture image maps do not.

Autodesk lists the unsupported properties together: texture image maps, smooth curved surfaces, text and dimensions, raster images, and saved pages. The oak veneer that looked convincing in SketchUp arrives as a flat brown surface. Nothing you set in the import dialog changes that.

There is a second trap that catches people out in renderings. If you painted only one side of a surface in SketchUp, Revit applies that material to both sides. Faces that are flipped, or painted differently front and back, end up showing the wrong material entirely. That is the real reason reversed faces sit so high in the cleanup list, and you tend to discover it at the render stage rather than the import stage.

So the practical rule is this: treat SketchUp colors as a placement aid, not as your finished appearance. Get the geometry across, then do the materials properly in Revit.

Object Styles is where you repaint an imported model inside Revit.

Revit does give you real control over an imported model's appearance, it just puts the controls somewhere unexpected. Go to the Manage tab, the Settings panel, and click Object Styles. Open the Imported Objects tab.

Every layer from your imported file shows up there as its own row, with columns for line weight, line color, line pattern and material. Click in the Material column and pick a genuine Revit material from the Material Browser. That material carries a real appearance asset, so it renders, shades and cuts like anything else you assign in Revit.

Which is exactly why the tagging you do in SketchUp matters more than the painting you do there. Consider two versions of the same reception desk:

Four tags is not a lot of discipline to ask for. It is also the difference between a model you can present and a model that looks like a study massing. The same principle shows up in reverse when you import a DWG into SketchUp, where the incoming layers decide how much you can control afterwards.

The family category decides visibility, cutting and scheduling.

An import can succeed completely and still misbehave for weeks, and the culprit is usually the category rather than the geometry. Set it on the Create tab (or Modify tab), Properties panel, Family Category and Parameters.

The category you choose there controls three things at once: how the geometry is drawn in views, whether you can select, tag and schedule the family, and how it reacts to a view's cut plane. Two details are worth memorizing:

• Enable Cutting in Views is the family parameter that makes geometry display as cut when a view's cut plane passes through it.
• Not every category is cuttable. Autodesk states that imports cannot be cut by cut planes unless they are imported into cuttable family categories.

Pick Furniture for a desk or a chair and it counts in a furniture schedule. Pick Generic Models when you genuinely do not know where the object belongs. Pick a category that is not cuttable and your section will show the outside of the object where you expected a clean cut, which is rarely what anyone wanted.

In the project's visibility settings you will find the import under Imported Categories, on the row covering imports inside families. That row is also the boundary of your control: you cannot isolate or override individual parts of an imported model the way you can with native Revit elements.

Revit LT imports SKP files, but the in-place route is not open to you.

Revit LT gets asked about a lot here, and the answer is better than most people expect. The Revit LT help documents Import CAD in the same place as full Revit, on the Insert tab under the Import panel, and lists importing SketchUp files among its related tasks (Import CAD in the Revit LT 2026 help, checked on 8 August 2026). Revit LT also has a Family Editor, so the loadable family route is fully available.

What is missing is the first option in Autodesk's instruction. The in-place elements topic that appears in the full Revit help is absent from the Revit LT help set, so plan on building a proper .rfa family rather than modeling in place. That is the better habit anyway.

The mass family variant in Autodesk's instructions, the one that ends with turning on Show Mass Form and Floors, assumes the conceptual massing environment. If you are on LT and importing a building volume rather than an object, treat the import as a reference to model against instead. Which licence you hold is worth checking in your Autodesk account before you plan a workflow around it; the differences between Revit editions show up in exactly these places.

An imported SketchUp model never becomes a parametric Revit element.

Nobody says this early enough, so here it is. There is no conversion. Your SketchUp walls will not become Revit walls with layers, fire ratings and a schedule entry.

Autodesk sets out the consequences: you cannot explode the 3D data, and faces disappear if you try; you cannot add parameters to make the form flexible; you can control the element's location and its material assignments; and converting mass faces to walls, floors or roofs is not always predictable, so it is not recommended.

What works is using the import as a reference and modeling over it. Place the volume, lock it, and build your real Revit walls, floors and openings against it. Only those native elements schedule correctly and cut properly. For anything that is genuinely scenery, a lamp, a planter, a sculpture, leave the import as it is. If you would rather keep a live connection to the source file, the Insert tab also has a Link panel, and a link keeps the Revit model in step with changes made to the file it points at.

Still not working? Five causes cover nearly every case.

Almost every failed SketchUp import falls into one of these.

If the file refuses outright, the problem is usually in the geometry itself. Autodesk names complex geometry with small holes as a known failure point. Split the SketchUp file and import in pieces, and two attempts will tell you which part is at fault. The full list of what does and does not survive is worth reading once (limitations of SketchUp data imported to Revit, checked on 8 August 2026). If you are still stuck after that, send us the file and we will look at it.

One closing observation. The people who never have import trouble are not the ones who know the dialog best. They are the ones who tag by material and sit their models on the origin out of habit, months before anyone mentions Revit.