With colors, textures, and photos, you can add details that make a 3D model look realistic and complete: Colors are like paint. Textures add realistic materials, such as carpet, tile, grass, wood, glass, and anything else you can capture as a digital image. Photos can be pinned to your model (or just a face within it). In SketchUp’s Materials panel (Microsoft Windows) or Colors panel (macOS), you find predefined colors and textures, which you can edit. Or try mixing your own colors or creating a texture from a photo.

Not all styles work well with SketchUp's default settings for selection colors or the display of hidden geometry, section planes and cuts, guides, and more. If you are color blind, changing these settings can also help you see SketchUp's modeling cues more clearly than you can with the default settings. In the Styles panel, the Edit tab has a Modeling Settings pane, shown in the following figure. Here you can customize colored visual cues and choose what cues, such as section planes, do or don't appear. You can save these selections with the active style.

SketchUp Styles can add complexity to a model that slow down SketchUp as you work on your 3D model. To apply the styles you need while optimizing performance, use Fast Style. When a style qualifies as a Fast Style, SketchUp displays a badge like this: If you apply a style created in SketchUp 2014 or earlier, the Fast Style doesn't display the badge until you force the style to update once in SketchUp.

In SketchUp, collections help you organize styles and easily access the ones you use most often. SketchUp includes several default collections, but you can create your own and save collections to a favorites list.The In Model styles collection is particularly helpful, because it contains all the styles currently included with your model file. To see your In Model styles, follow these steps:

In SketchUp, you can create and edit styles so that you can apply your preferred style settings with a single click.To create a new style, follow these steps:

A big part of your model's style is what you see in the background. SketchUp makes it easy to customize the background including the sky, horizon, and ground to best fit the style of your model. After all, what's the use in making a Mars Rover if it doesn't look like it's on Mars? You can customize the background colors of your model in the Styles panel by following these steps:

Styles in SketchUp are a great way to help you convey information about your model without saying a word. A Style is a collection of specific settings for edges, faces, and backgrounds. A Style with pencil-drawn edges and a fuzzy color scheme can suggest your model is still a work-in-progress, while a more formal model will use colors and settings that can help make your model more photo-realistic. Using the Styles PanelThe Styles panel contains a great selection of predefined styles you can use in your model. To choose a Style: 

As you create a model in 3D, you need to view it from all sides. In SketchUp, you orbit, zoom, and pan all the time as you draw:Orbit: When you orbit, you move around, above, or below your model. Orbiting is like flying around your model Peter Pan–style.Zoom: Zoom in to focus on a specific area as you draw, and zoom out to see more of your model.Pan: When you pan, you move left, right, up, or down. 

To create a 3D model in SketchUp, you're constantly switching among the drawing tools, views, components, and organizational tools. In this article, you find several examples that illustrate ways you can use these tools together to model a specific shape or object.The examples illustrate a few of the different applications for creating 3D models in SketchUp: woodworking, modeling parts or abstract objects, and creating buildings. The examples are loosely ordered from the simple to the complex.

Fog is primarily used as a special effect during presentations. The fog effect mimics real fog, as shown in the figure, so your 3D model becomes clearer as you zoom closer to it, and less clear as you move away. To add fog-like effects to your model, follow these steps: