This article has been re-posted from the Igloo Studios blog

SketchUp wasn’t built to help you specify products. Even if you’ve used Dynamic Components or just generic components and materials, documenting your SketchUp design is a tedious, time-consuming and often error prone process. Which wood finish did I select? How much will those appliances cost? How many cabinets do I have to order? These questions, and many more like them, can eat-up days of time.... time that we’d probably all rather spend designing instead.

Create easy product schedules and paste them into your LayOut design presentation

That’s why we created Product Connect for Google SketchUp. Product Connect leverages product models and a SketchUp-based plugin to make it easy to design with real products. Now designers can quickly find real products for their designs, add and edit important product information, and save organized product reports.

We created this short video explaining the new version of Product Connect released earlier this month:

If you use Google SketchUp to design projects that require real products and materials, you need to try Product Connect. Specifically, it was designed to help you with these three major product related issues

Get Products


You can significantly speed-up the design process and also make your design presentations that much more compelling when you add pre-existing product models from the Google 3D Warehouse. Get Products is a new tool that makes it dead simple to add product models: Like the Get Models tool, Get Products launches the Google 3D Warehouse. Only it directs you to a collection with nearly 300 sub-collections of branded and generic product models. Choose a Product Connect enabled catalog and all of the product information has already been configured for you. Or, choose other Building Product models and add the information yourself.

Product Editor

Can’t find what you are looking for on the Warehouse? With the new Product Editor tool, now you can create your own Product Connect enabled models. Just take any SketchUp component (including materials), launch Product Editor, and add any information you need such as product type, name and description. Product Editor is also great for adding and editing information in Product Connect enabled models such as project specific notes or price.

Report Maker


When you’ve finished your design, and filled it with Product Connect enabled components, the new and improved Report Maker tool allows you to save organized product schedules in .csv format. In just a couple of clicks, you save hours of time and end up with product lists that can be included in construction document sets, edited to create pricing estimates, and even used to place and manage orders.

We’re excited to see how you’ll leverage Product Connect in your professional workflow. Please give it a try and drop us a line to tell us what you think! And remember, if you need any help you can check-out our Product Connect help page where we’ve got a collection of tutorials to get you up and running.