How to Prepare a SketchUp Model for AI Visualizations? Framing, Edges, Shadows and Export

Why does the SketchUp view determine the quality of an AI visualization?

Input quality is about 80% of the result's quality, so how you prepare a SketchUp view for AI matters more than any setting in the generator. Raya adds photorealism to the scene you show it, and it sticks closely to the geometry you upload.

Two rules follow from this, and they come back throughout this guide with every setting. First: whatever is visible in the scene is what AI will process. Second: if you can fix something in the model in a few minutes, fix it in the model.

I've seen plenty of generations where a user tried to shift tiles by 10 cm through one text instruction after another. Arranging tiles in SketchUp takes less time, costs zero credits, and gives the AI unambiguous information that it knows exactly what to do with. Describing in words what you could simply draw will always be the weaker solution.

The easiest way to see this for yourself is on your own project: send the same frame once as-is, and once after running it through the settings in this guide, then compare the two results. A new Raya account gets 20 free credits to start, with no card required, so a test like this costs you nothing. If you're just getting started, take a look first at what the whole path from a 3D view to a finished visualizationlooks like. Here, we're focusing solely on what happens before you send the image.

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The image on the left produced the image on the right

How to prepare a 3D scene so AI doesn't hallucinate?

Since AI reproduces what it sees, the scene above all needs to be complete. Every element that gets cut off or left unfinished in the frame becomes a puzzle for the model, and AI solves puzzles its own way, differently every time.

One of the problems is sections with a visible cutting plane. On the left side of the frame you have the interior, on the right a bare background, and between them a sharp edge running the full height of the image. What would you expect in that situation? For the AI to build in the missing wall, or to leave an open space? The model has no way of deciding, so it's better to close off the section or send a view without it.

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The same rule applies to markers left over from the design work. Before exporting, hide guide lines, dimensions and text. You don't need to worry about axes, since they aren't included in the export, but a dimension line crossing a wall will be treated as part of the interior.

A separate trap awaits people working with V-Ray. Proxy files are just a bunch of triangles to the AI, and assets from the Chaos Cosmos library show up in the viewport as white blobs. In classic rendering this solution works perfectly and saves memory, but AI has no way of knowing that such a blob is actually an oak chair. In a scene prepared for Raya, put real geometry there instead, even a simplified one. If you're missing a specific piece of furniture, you can generate a 3D model from a photo and insert it into the scene.

While you're at it, clean up the frame from V-Ray (or whatever rendering engine you work with). The Hide V-Ray widgets command hides the icons for lights, cameras, domes and other helper objects that are just markers in the working window but look to AI like strange, yet real, pieces of interior furnishing.

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What frame proportions should you choose for AI visualization?

A complete scene is only half the job, because now it needs to be enclosed in a frame. What works best are natural photo proportions, meaning the ones that usually come out of a camera and that models have seen the most of during training:

• 16:9 - horizontal interiors and exteriors,

• 9:16 - vertical frames typical of social media,

• 4:3 and 3:2 - classic photography ratios, also in vertical form,

• 5:4 - tight frames,

• 1:1 - once-popular square views.

Crop the frame precisely before sending it. The more precisely you set it yourself, the fewer reasons AI has to change anything in it, and this way you get a visualization of exactly the view you have in your project.

Heavily elongated panoramas and narrow vertical strips come out poorly. AI isn't prepared for such proportions. Besides, where would you even use it? A 4:1 view won't even fit on a curved ultrawide monitor...

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At what height should you set the camera in SketchUp?

Proportions sorted, now it's time for the camera. For interiors, a height of 100-120 cmworks best, meaning a bit lower than a standing person's eye level, since such a frame captures more floor and furniture and less empty ceiling. It also properly shows off the kitchen, especially wall-mounted units.

In exteriors, you can go back up to human eye level. A building seen from a pedestrian's viewpoint is a view AI knows from thousands of architecture photos, so it will reproduce it with high confidence.

Still, avoid flat elevations. A view perpendicular to the facade, with no perspective, looks to AI as flat as a technical drawing. The model has nothing to read depth from, so alcoves, recesses and furniture lose their three-dimensionality. Widen the field of view, rotate the camera a dozen or so degrees, drop down to eye level and keep the perspective. You'll get a photo instead of a drawing.

Extremes at the other end of the spectrum are a problem too. A frog's-eye perspective, meaning a camera just above the floor tilted upward, produces a frame you'll practically never see in interior photography. An overly stretched field of view acts similarly: the image starts to look like it was shot with a wide-angle lens, the walls splay outward, and AI ends up with geometry it can't read as an ordinary room. Stick to a view that's natural for the human eye.

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Axonometric and bird's-eye views are perfectly fine, and I use them myself. Just keep in mind that natural, human-eye views are overrepresented in training data, which is why AI performs best with them. An axonometric projection is sometimes worth an extra generation or two.

Once you have the frame, save it as a scene. It sounds obvious, but I figured it was worth mentioning. That way you can get back to it with a single click.

How to set up materials and textures in SketchUp for AI?

Framing and the camera determine what AI sees, while materials determine how it interprets the scene. Turn on the View / Face Style / Shaded with texturesview so your SketchUp materials get faithfully reproduced by Raya.

A white (or red) clay render is out of the question. When the whole scene is white, the model has no clue and assigns random textures to surfaces, so the floor may come out as concrete even though it's oak in the project. Want a marble countertop? Make it marble in SketchUp, and you'll get marble exactly where you planned it.

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The image on the left produced the image on the right

AI will also take texture scale literally, so a tile stretched across half a wall will be stretched in the generation as well. Spend a minute properly scaling the materials before you send the view.

Watch out! Colors close to wood can confuse the model. Brown and dark beige applied to a chair or a door are often read as wood, because that's the kind of geometry AI most often associates with wood. If it's meant to be a lacquered piece of furniture in cappuccino color, or a matte beige door, add that to the material description in the "Generate" tab. One sentence like "matte lacquered cappuccino-colored fronts, no wood grain" is enough to stop the AI from guessing.

What should you do with glass so AI recognizes it?

Transparent materials follow a separate rule, since this is the one case where a correctly set material looks worse in the viewport than an unset one. Glass can't have zero opacity, nor an empty color. Leave it a slight tint and a higher Opacity value.

Raya understands glass panes, balustrades and furniture perfectly well, but it has to see them first. A fully transparent surface in the SketchUp preview (set up for V-Ray) is simply invisible. AI can't read minds.

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Where do blue walls come from? Reversed faces in SketchUp.

Reversed faces are a problem that's easy to forget about. AI doesn't distinguish between the left and right side of a wall. It sees color: white is white, and blue is blue.

So either leave the default blue back-face color or change it to red. SketchUp's typical blue back-face color sometimes blends into the model, making the error hard to spot. Red stands out immediately. Flip reversed faces before exporting, otherwise you'll end up with a visualization showing a red (or blue) wall where the project actually has a white wall.

Edges and profiles in SketchUp styles: what should you turn off before exporting?

Materials are done, so what's left is the view style, and edges are the most important part of it! AI reads thick profiles as a cartoon outline and steers the whole generation toward an illustration, a comic-book look.

If you're after photorealism, turn off Profiles and keep thin Edges. In the style settings you can go further in three different ways (pick whichever):

1. Lighten the edge color to a value of 15, 15, 15 instead of black at 0, 0, 0.

2. Set Color / By material, so the edges take on the colors of the materials.

3. Turn off edges completely and keep just the colors with textures.

The first method is the quickest and pretty much always safe, since very dark outlines can be misinterpreted. A few points up is enough to keep the line from reading as a solid black stroke. The second gives the nicest effect, because the edge of a white wall turns white, and an oak floor's edge turns brown, so the whole model stops looking chopped up by dark lines. It does require tidiness, though, since colors have to be applied to faces, not groups. The third can be interesting in exteriors with dense vegetation, where edges - even the faintest ones - blend into a black smudge.

A good illustration of this is a molding with a fine pattern. Outlined in a thick, black stroke, the dark lines overlap each other, the white between them disappears, and to AI that molding is simply BLACK.

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There's one more thing to explain. Models from the 3D Warehouse usually download without smoothing, so a cylinder, an arch or a chair's backrest ends up covered in a dense mesh of lines. AI reads this as a material division or a texture, and instead of a smooth backrest you get a striped one, and instead of a round column you get a post covered in planks.

Select such an object and find the Soften Edges section in the default tray on the right. A typical 20 degrees is usually more than enough, and checking Smooth normals and Soften coplanar cleans up the mesh along with the lines between coplanar faces. After that, AI gets a smooth solid instead of a checkered object.

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Should you turn shadows on or off before sending the view to AI?

Edges are one thing, shadows are another, and here it all depends on the type of scene. In interiors, turn off cast, sharp shadows, since they'll be reproduced one to one.

Sunlight coming through a window can draw sharp geometric shapes on a rug. Raya will treat them as part of the scene, sometimes even as geometry, and you'll end up with a strange bright rectangle on the floor. Photorealistic interiors are usually based on soft, diffused natural light, so hard sun patches in the input work against you.

In exteriors the situation is quite different. Cast shadow helps convey the shape, the depth of the geometry, and balcony overhangs, so it's worth keeping it in exteriors.

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Date and time in the Shadows panel: set the light direction to match the project

Speaking of the sun, it's worth using it to your advantage. In the Shadows panel you can control the date and time, and along with them, the direction the light comes from.

A properly set date and time make the shading in the view match the reality of the project: the sun comes in exactly from the side where the windows are. AI then gets consistent information and doesn't have to guess which side of the room should be brighter. This matters even when cast shadows are turned off, since the sun's position also drives the shading of the surfaces.

Why does the ceiling in the visualization come out dark gray?

The sun's position is one thing, and shading intensity is a separate matter. The Light and Dark sliders control the brightness difference between surfaces set at different angles. A wall you're looking at perpendicularly is brighter than one seen at a sharp angle.

This is an effect known from real life. We see exactly the same thing every day when light hits interior walls, so the effect is natural. The problem starts when AI interprets a white ceiling as gray, and a gray wall as almost white. This is usually the most recurring error in Raya's generations: a ceiling a few shades darker than the walls, even though it's exactly the same color in the project.

You can fix this in two steps. First, check Use sun for shading, since without it the sliders won't do anything. Then bring the two values closer together, for example Light 60 and Dark 70. The difference between surfaces stays, but the colors don't lie as much.

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Ambient Occlusion in SketchUp: what is it and which settings should you choose?

Since you're turning off some shadows, it's worth turning on another kind, the so-called edge shadows. Ambient Occlusion, or AO for short, is darkening in places where surfaces come close together at the sharpest angle and diffused light has a harder time reaching: in corners, gaps, and under elements set away from a wall.

In SketchUp you'll find it under View / Face Style / Ambient Occlusion. The feature appeared in the 2024 version and requires the new graphics engine, so users of older releases might not know about it.

What's it for, from AI's perspective? A subtle shadow in a gap tells the model that a wall sconce is hanging a few centimeters away from the wall, instead of being flat against it. Suspended ceilings work the same way, where the level difference can be invisible. A suspended ceiling drawn with plain lines is just a line on a flat ceiling to AI, but a spreading shadow turns it into a real recess.

Set a very small Distance and a very small Intensity in the style settings, under Ambient Occlusion. Too strong an AO brings the raw SketchUp view closer to photorealism and paradoxically makes it harder to add the real, desired result, since the model gets a scene already darkened in places it should be filling with light itself. It's meant to be a subtle hint, subtle enough that once you shrink the image down to a thumbnail, you can barely see it.

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Where should you place light sources so AI can see them?

Ambient Occlusion explains space to AI, and light sources explain direction to it. The rule is simple: if you want specific lighting, show it in the scene.

A visible fixture gives Raya the full picture: what type of lamp it is, what kind of light it emits, and from which direction it should shine. A pendant lamp hanging over a table that's visible in the frame will work better than even the longest description. A wall sconce cut off by the edge of the frame won't, though, since the model only sees a fragment of the housing and has to guess whether it's even lit.

The same goes for windows. When it's clearly visible where the sunlight is coming from, the result becomes more predictable. You can refine this further in the lighting settings under the "Generate" tab, where in advanced mode you can describe the light in your own words, or you can turn on the "Turn on lights" toggle. And if a room has no windows, like a walk-in closet or a bathroom deep inside an apartment, reach for the "No windows" preset instead of counting on AI to figure it out on its own - but remember, set up the scene so the fixtures are visible in it.

There's one more technique, rare but effective: a yellow material with a gradient mask that, already at the SketchUp working-window stage, suggests an LED strip. The topic deserves a longer explanation, so I'll leave it for a separate article on artificial light.

Turning off the background in SketchUp: the green-and-blue view outside the window

Light comes in through windows, and through those same windows you can see the background, which is another place where SketchUp can cause trouble. The default green grass and blue sky with a characteristic horizon line sometimes get reproduced one to one, which never looks good.

The simplest solution is to turn off the Ground option in the style settings. Outside the window you're then left with a solid white plane, which AI will fill in on its own, usually quite sensibly. This is actually the method I use myself!

You have two more alternatives. You can insert your own background by typing "background" into the 3D Warehouse, or use the Environments feature, which came to SketchUp in the 2025 version. Whichever route you take, it's worth adding a note in the text instructions about what should be outside the window, since that gives Raya an unambiguous cue. One sentence about an urban skyline or a pine forest can change the whole feel of the interior.

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How do you solve the mirror problem in AI visualizations?

The background outside a window can be worked around with style settings, but a mirror in SketchUp simply doesn't exist. The program doesn't show reflections, by definition. A mirrored surface looks like a plain gray fill in the viewport, and that's exactly how it reaches AI.

The effect is predictable. Since the model sees a gray plane, it will generate a gray plane.

That's why we added the "Pick mirrors" feature to the Raya plugin for SketchUp funkcję "Pick mirrors". You use it to pick any surfaces in the model, and the plugin adds real mirror reflections to them right there in SketchUp, based on your model's geometry. You send the generator a view where the mirror reflects exactly what it should, so AI doesn't have to make anything up. For a bathroom with a mirror over the sink, or a whole mirrored wall in an entryway, this solves a problem that previously couldn't be worked around other than by manually adding the reflection or feeding precise text instructions into the Raya generator.

We've laid out how to pick surfaces step by step in a separate guide on correct mirror reflections, along with a list of things this feature won't do.

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The image on the left produced the image on the right

How do you export a SketchUp view to AI?

The model is ready, the style is set, so there's one last step left, and it's the easiest one to get wrong. Export the view only through File / Export / 2D Graphic.

A print screen gives you screen resolution, usually too low, plus interface overlays. A photo of the screen taken with a phone comes out even worse, since the lens curvature bends the verticals, and AI will render that same warped room. Both methods sound like a joke, but we see them regularly. Raya can handle even that kind of input, but why make its job harder?

In the export window, go into Options, uncheck Use view size and enter your own dimensions. Aim for a minimum of 1440 px on the shorter side and leave Anti-alias turned on. The default width is too low: at 800x600, thin lines start overlapping each other and fine details stop being visible, so there's nothing to reconstruct moldings or grout lines from.

Raya accepts input up to 2K, and beyond that the gain is minimal, so the range worth staying within is 1440-2000 px on the shorter side.

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Which file format should you upload to AI: PNG, JPG or TIF?

Resolution sorted, format is left. The differences are smaller than you'd think. PNG and TIF are lossless, JPEG is lossy, but with good compression quality the difference in the generation's result comes out marginal. Raya accepts all three formats, up to 10 MB per file.

Still, there are two things worth checking before clicking Export. With PNG, uncheck transparent background, since an alpha channel instead of a white background causes trouble on input (it often shows up as black). A high-resolution TIF, on the other hand, can exceed the 10 MB limit, so in practice a good-quality JPG is the most convenient.

Formats that aren't images are out, though. PDF and DWG simply won't be read.

The Raya plugin for SketchUp: AI rendering without exporting a file

Everything above applies to manual export, and that isn't strictly necessary. The free Raya plugin for SketchUp captures the current view and sends it straight to the generator.

You set the frame in SketchUp, but you don't have to worry about proportions, resolution, format or file size limits. All of those disappear from your list of concerns. What remains are the other rules from this guide: view style, edges, shadows, materials and scene completeness are things you still need to set up yourself, since no plugin will do that for you (not yet, anyway ;)).

Checklist before exporting a view to AI

Preparing the view sounds like a long list, but in practice it comes down to a handful of switches you set once and then forget about. Before you click export, make sure of the following:

• the scene is complete, with no visible section-cut plane, no gaps, and background all around,

• guide lines, dimensions, text and V-Ray (or other rendering engine) widgets are hidden,

• the frame is in natural proportions, the camera is at a height of 100-120 cm, perspective is used instead of a flat elevation,

• the view is set to Shaded with textures and reversed faces are correctly flipped the right way,

• profiles are off, edges are thin and lightened,

• cast shadows are off in interiors, date and time match the window orientation,

• Use sun for shading is checked, with parameters Light 60 and Dark 70 to reduce the contrast between the ceiling and the walls,

• a subtle Ambient Occlusion is applied to help correctly read the geometry of the space,

• Ground is turned off and the view outside the window is white,

• export at a minimum of 1440 px on the shorter side.

Save this set of settings in SketchUp as your own style. I keep it on hand in every project and switch it on with a single click before sending the view to Raya. I used this exact checklist while making the visualizations for this article.

Start with one frame you know well, and run it through every point. To start, you get 20 free credits, which is about 10 2K visualizations. That's plenty for your first tests, with room to spare. Once the result gets close to what you're aiming for, you can fine-tune the rest in the "Edit" tab, without going back to the 3D model.