3dshouse Dynamic Sketchup Extension Tutorials

These tutorials cover the 3dshouse Dynamic extension (now part of Parashape) for SketchUp. Everything here builds on SketchUp’s native Dynamic Components, so the techniques work on any SketchUp Pro subscription — Dynamic Components ship with SketchUp 2022 through 2026, but authoring (editing formulas) requires the Pro tier; the free web and Go plans can only resize and use existing components, not create them.

General Tutorials

Start with how Dynamic Components recalculate. A point that trips up most beginners: after you stretch a component with the Scale tool, dependent formulas do not always refresh on their own — you have to right-click the component and choose Dynamic Components → Redraw (or call REDRAW() in a formula) before LenX/LenY and any sizes derived from them update. Until then the geometry can look stretched and skewed rather than re-built.

Two more things worth knowing early: the Interact tool only fires onClick actions — it never edits formulas, so users can run your component without ever opening the attributes panel. And functions and attribute names in formulas are case-sensitive and must use the exact units SketchUp expects; a value with no unit is read in inches, which silently breaks dimensions for anyone working in millimetres.

Interior Design

For cabinetry, shelving and built-ins, the parametric workflow is where Dynamic Components save the most time. The non-obvious win here is nesting: a child component can reference its parent’s size with formulas like =Cabinet!LenX, so resizing the parent cabinet automatically repositions shelves and dividers — but only the top-level component scales cleanly, so always model the outer box as the parent and keep doors, shelves and hardware as children inside it.

Use the Options panel (the attributes you mark as user-editable) to expose only the choices a client should change — width, number of shelves, finish — and hide the formula plumbing. This keeps a single component standing in for a whole product range instead of duplicating files per size.

CNC Furniture Production

When the goal is cut-ready parts rather than a render, the same parametric model becomes a sizing engine. Drive panel dimensions from a few master variables (carcass width, height, depth, material thickness) so changing one input re-derives every part. Subtract material thickness explicitly in your formulas — a shelf that is =Carcass!LenX will be too wide once you account for the side panels, so write =Carcass!LenX-2*Thickness to get a part that actually fits.

For export to CAM/nesting software, flatten the model into individual panels and report dimensions from the component’s own attributes rather than measuring geometry by hand, which keeps the cut list in sync every time a parameter changes.