Click – click take all the materials

You see a model with nice materials, you want to use it for your model, material colletion in Sketchup is so easy

Tutorial video:

Steps by steps:

• Material collection tool click
• All materials have been arranged for array, manage and access easily
• When you use for other models – import this model – pick materials – enjoy

  

Tips that make this work better:

• You don’t even need to import a whole model to steal its materials. Open the donor file, then hold Alt (Windows) or Command (Mac) while the Paint Bucket tool is active — this turns the cursor into an eyedropper. Click any face and that exact material lands in your In Model collection, ready to reuse.
• The biggest trap with a “material collection” file: a sampled material only stays in the model if it is actually painted onto something. Loose materials that aren’t applied to a face get wiped the next time SketchUp purges (Window > Model Info > Statistics > Purge Unused, which also runs on save in some workflows). That is exactly why this collection model uses a small swatch face for every material — keep them applied or you’ll lose them.
• Watch the file weight. Each texture can carry its original image, so a single 2048×2048 material is roughly 2.4 MB; a collection of a few hundred high-res textures can bloat your working file into the hundreds of MB and slow navigation badly. Once you’ve borrowed what you need, delete the imported collection group and Purge Unused to drop everything you didn’t paint.
• Materials also live outside any single model: you can save a swatch as a standalone .skm file, or pull whole material packs from 3D Warehouse, and reuse them across every project.

Note on versions: since 2020 SketchUp is a named-user subscription (no more perpetual licenses), and the current desktop release is SketchUp 2026 — but material sampling, the eyedropper modifier key, and Purge Unused have worked the same way for years, so this technique applies to any modern version.