SketchUp 2027’s Revit importer aims to turn tagged models into editable elements

Trimble used its Dimensions User Conference and 3D Basecamp in Las Vegas on Nov. 10 to put a number on a headache every design studio knows. Citing Dodge Data & Analytics research, the company said up to 40% of design time in mid-to-late project phases goes to re-keying, re-modeling and cleaning up geometry that has moved from a concept tool into a documentation platform.

SketchUp 2027 is Trimble's answer. AEC Magazine summed up the release as an attempt to close the gap between early conceptual design and detailed Revit documentation, built around two additions: Procedures, a non-destructive modeling system, and a new SketchUp Importer for Revit. Trimble frames them as fixes for the two most expensive kinds of rework: rebuilding a model when the design changes, and rebuilding it again when it moves to another tool.

Chris Cronin, Trimble's senior vice president of architecture and design solutions and education, put the pitch in one line: "Great design is iterative, and the tools designers use have to keep pace with their ideas." Iteration is the easy part to promise. Keeping pace depends on what the model carries when the ideas change.

Look at how both features work, though, and a pattern shows up. Each one rewards setup done before the work starts. For a design technology lead or BIM manager deciding how to roll out 2027, that's the planning question. Licenses come second.

What the Revit importer reads

The mechanism is simple. According to the Trimble announcement, the importer recognizes component tags and classes in a SketchUp model, maps them to Revit categories and converts them into native Revit architectural elements. Those elements can be edited, scheduled and documented like anything modeled in Revit. Trimble says a few minutes spent organizing components in SketchUp is enough to cut manual rework.

The Revit importer converts what designers have tagged and classed, so the quality of the handoff is set in SketchUp, long before anyone opens Revit. That makes a tagging convention production data, not housekeeping. Other 2027 changes point the same way. The release notes list a new Outliner sort that groups component instances by tag, an Import Metadata option for DWG and DXF files that turns each imported element into a SketchUp component, CRS-aware IFC exports and closer parity between TrimBIM and IFC.

The CAD import changes go deeper than metadata. A new Tessellation Quality section in DWG and DXF import options sets mesh detail through angular deviation, chordal tolerance and maximum edge length, and a new Annotation section decides whether incoming text, dimensions and hatch arrive as native SketchUp objects, contours, linework or nothing at all. Add Location now supports coordinate reference systems, so a model can be geolocated in the project's own coordinates. For a studio that receives consultant CAD and sends IFC back out, those settings could decide how clean a model is before anyone starts tagging it.

Access is narrower than the release itself. SketchUp 2027.0 is out now for Pro and higher tiers, including Studio for Higher Ed, with select capabilities reaching Go subscribers on SketchUp for iPad. The importer is expected in November 2026 at no added cost, but only to Pro Advanced Workflows and Studio subscribers. Firms with mixed licenses could end up with concept designers who can't run the importer themselves and have to hand files to someone who can.

There's an obvious case where none of this matters much. Studios that use SketchUp only for client-facing massing and visuals, and never send the model on to Revit, will judge 2027 on Procedures, hatching and the interface changes. For them, the importer is a feature on a tier they may not pay for.

Procedures on a working model

Per the release notes, Procedures turn three familiar operations into editable, non-destructive procedural components: Follow Me, a selection of Solid Tools and a new Copy Along tool. Trimble's pitch is that designers can try ideas and take last-minute revisions without rebuilding the model or losing finished work.

A hands-on walkthrough posted Oct. 26 by Justin of TheSketchUpEssentials shows what that looks like on screen. The procedural tools sit in their own toolbar, found by right-clicking the toolbar area, and he believes Copy Along works with both groups and components. For Copy Along, he selects an object and a path, then runs the tool along the entire path, each segment or corners only.

The resulting group holds its settings in Entity Info, where spacing can be set by distance or count, with an exact-spacing checkbox to stop SketchUp from approximating the gaps to fit more copies. Edit the path, and the copies update live, as long as the path stays a single connected chain. Shorten the source object, and every copy shortens too.

A right-click 'explode to inputs' brings back the original object and path, and 'make non-procedural' freezes the result as plain geometry. One small catch for anyone checking spacing: the dimension tool snaps only to the generated copies, not to the ghosted source geometry shown when you open the group.

• Entire path: copies run along the full path at the set spacing.
• Each segment: copies run segment by segment, which creates overlaps at the corners.
• On corners: copies land only at corners, more useful on paths with a lot of them.
• Road-like vs. stair-like: on a twisting path, road-like adds rotation to each copy as it climbs, while stair-like keeps copies upright, the option he expects to use 99% of the time.

Those options are small, but they are the kind of setting a firm could standardize once in a template rather than leave to each designer's habit, the same logic that applies to tags.

The more consequential demo may be procedural Solid Tools. He subtracted push-pulled solids from an arcade wall to cut openings that stay editable, and said he expects that to matter for doors and windows. It also raises the stakes on clean solid modeling. He went on to combine Copy Along and Follow Me with procedural cuts, and to change Follow Me profiles without starting over.

João Queiroz e Lima, co-founder of CASCA Architecture & Design, said in Trimble's announcement that Procedures can be stacked to build complex assemblies, and that using them together with hatches had already changed how he works. He called 2027 "so far, the best release ever, mostly because of two features: Procedures and Hatches."

The walkthrough also turned up two open questions worth testing before a firm-wide rollout. He hadn't measured whether a model full of live procedures slows down. And placing objects along curves felt imprecise to him: placement depended on where the object sat relative to the path before the tool ran, not on the object's own axis, which is how path-copy tools he'd used before worked. His workaround was to position the source object first and then run the procedure. Same lesson as the importer. Get the inputs right, and the tool handles the changes.

Changes in the drawing set

Section Hatch Patterns apply fills to cut faces so brick, concrete and batt insulation read differently in section, with control over how much detail each drawing shows. The release notes say the patterns are managed from a new Hatch Patterns panel, Entity Info or the Styles panel. That lets a firm build hatching into its office styles once instead of patching drawings in another tool. Queiroz e Lima described hatches as a subset of materials, "vector-based and crisp," with instant feedback.

In LayOut, a new draw mode for scaled drawings gives a paperless canvas at 1:1 scale, so teams can draft in 2D without picking a page size or drawing scale up front. A rebuilt hidden-line rendering engine cuts the time to generate vector linework for complex models, according to the release notes, which add that in SketchUp it also speeds more graphics-intensive import workflows.

The new engine ships as a Public Labs feature turned on by default, with the classic engine still available as a fallback. Firms with heavy LayOut sets should treat it as a pilot item: run a large live project through it before the deadline, not during.

Smaller additions round out the release. AutoFit Live Components size themselves to the face they're dropped on. LayOut viewports get image adjustment controls for fine-tuning raster or hybrid renders and image files without an external editor. A Spatial Preview extension streams a live model to Apple Vision Pro from a Mac using Mac Virtual Display, built on new SketchUp USD converters and Apple's USDPreviewSession, so geometry and material edits show up in the headset without exporting.

Rollout checks for IT

Hardware is the first gate. SketchUp 2027.0 runs only on Apple Silicon Macs, a change Trimble ties to Apple ending support for Intel Macs in future macOS versions. The release notes point back to Apple's 2020 announcement of that transition. Any studio still running Intel Macs has a refresh decision before it can upgrade those seats.

The interface now matches across platforms, based on the Windows version, with dockable toolbars and trays coming to Mac, and a dockable Ruby Console on both. Multiple models open as tabs in a single SketchUp or LayOut instance and can be pulled out into floating windows on a second display. Closing every tab no longer quits the app.

Alex Schreyer, writing at SketchUp for Design, noted that educators no longer have to teach the interface twice, though differences remain between the desktop and the web and iPad versions. He also pointed out that the new tab row takes a bit of screen space even when only one model is open.

Trimble also introduced the Trimble Connect Design Hub, labeled Labs and built on the Trimble Connect platform. It automatically captures designer and client messages and pulls 3D models, file management and project administration into one project record, which Trimble pitches as a single source of truth in place of scattered threads. The Labs label marks it as early-stage, so it makes more sense as a pilot than a firm standard for now.

The importer's November arrival is the real test. Take a tagged concept model from a live project, run it through, and count how many elements land in Revit ready to schedule versus how many still need rebuilding. That number will show whether a firm's tag standard is ready, and how much of the 40% problem it can actually take on.