SketchUp to Photoreal Render With AI: Export, Enhance, Upscale

SketchUp is where a lot of early design happens, and the gap between a SketchUp view and an image a client reacts to has always been a render engine, a material library, and an afternoon. The AI route is: export a view, upload it, direct the materials and light in a sentence, and get a photoreal image back. Here's how to do that without the AI redrawing your building.

Step 1: Export the right view

• Export a 2D image of the view (File → Export → 2D Graphic), at least 1,600 px on the long edge. A screenshot works in a pinch.
• Use a believable camera: eye height around 1.6 m for interiors, a slightly elevated three-quarter view for exteriors, perspective on. Extreme wide angles get "corrected" by the model, usually in ways you don't want.
• Turn off the things that aren't architecture: section planes, guides, axes, the sky grid. Shadows on are fine and often help.
• Leave the textures you have. A clay model and a textured model both work; they just go to different tools.

Step 2: Pick the tool for what you exported

• Clay, white, or untextured model → Exterior AI or Interior AI (100 credits). Describe the materials and mood; the tool renders them onto your massing. Leave Structure Lock ticked so the walls, openings, and proportions stay as modelled, and leave the Faithful ↔ Creative slider at its default.
• Already textured, just flat and lifeless → Render Enhancer (100 credits). It improves materials and lighting on an existing render from any engine or a draft pass, guided by short refinement notes, without re-imagining the scene.
• Hand sketch over the SketchUp view → Sketch to Image, which is built for line drawings and has Structure Lock on by default.

Step 3: Prompt the materials, not the building

The export already describes the architecture. The prompt's job is what the export doesn't say: "white render with charred-timber accent wall, black steel frames, standing-seam roof, late afternoon, long shadows, native planting." If you describe the building ("two-storey, flat roof") and the export disagrees even slightly, you've asked the model to choose between them. Tick Maintain Colors if you've already set the palette in SketchUp and want it held exactly.

Step 4: Fix, then upscale once

Run two or three prompt variations rather than agonising over one. Fix a wrong window or an odd shadow with Inpainting on just that region. Only then send the keeper through the 4K Upscaler (100 credits, 2× or 4×) for the version that goes in the deck — upscaling something you're about to discard is the most common way to waste credits.

What this is not

It's not a V-Ray or Enscape replacement. A render engine computes a physically correct image of a complete model with dimensional truth; this gives you a photoreal visualisation of a design direction from the view you have right now. Most practices use it earlier — concept, design development, the client conversation — and move to the engine when the model is detailed enough to deserve it. And nothing in an AI image is dimensionally reliable: keep measurements on the drawing set. If you want the SketchUp plan itself as editable geometry in Archify, export it to DXF (SketchUp Pro) and import it into Design Studio.