CleanUp³ SketchUp Plugin: Download, Install & Settings Guide

CleanUp³ by ThomThom is the free SketchUp extension that strips waste out of a model: stray edges, split edges, duplicate faces, unused components and materials, and the edges that needlessly cut one flat surface into dozens of faces. The current build is 3.4.6, released 24 February 2024 — still the newest. Set expectations before you install it: CleanUp³ deletes and merges, it never decimates. A curved surface or an imported high-poly mesh comes out of a clean run with exactly the triangle count it went in with.

CleanUp³ plugin for SketchUp — download and hard facts

• Version 3.4.6, tagged 24 February 2024 by the author. The SketchUcation PluginStore entry shows the same version and date, with 252,379 downloads.
• Author: ThomThom (Thomas Thomassen). Price: free. The source is public and MIT-licensed.
• Extension Warehouse compatibility: SketchUp 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026 — Windows and Mac, English only.
• TT_Lib² is a hard dependency and is not bundled. CleanUp³’s core file opens with require 'TT_Lib2/core'; when that fails you get a dialog titled “TT_Lib² Not Installed” pointing at the library’s own Warehouse page. Install TT_Lib² first, CleanUp³ second.
• There is no CleanUp³ toolbar. The Warehouse page’s line “Menus & Toolbars: Plugins » CleanUp” is the whole story — the source registers menu items and not one toolbar button. Since SketchUp 2015 the old “Plugins” menu is the Extensions menu (the Ruby API keeps the old name working for backward compatibility), so look under Extensions » CleanUp³.

Installed but nothing appears: two silent gates

Both failures look identical from outside: the extension is listed and enabled in Extension Manager, and no CleanUp³ entry exists in any menu.

• TT_Lib² missing. You get one dialog, “TT_Lib² Not Installed”, whose page says only “Please download and install the latest release” and links to the TT_Lib² listing. If you closed it once, it does not come back in that session.
• TT_Lib² too old. Everything in CleanUp³ sits inside a single condition: TT::Lib.compatible?('2.11.0', 'CleanUp³'). An older library and the entire file is skipped — no menu, no error, no warning at all. Note the Warehouse listing still states the requirement as “TT_Lib² — 2.10.0” while 3.4.6’s code demands 2.11.0; trust the code and take the current TT_Lib² (2.16.0).
• SketchUp 2022 is the awkward case. CleanUp³ is listed for 2022–2026, but the TT_Lib² listing now reads 2023–2027. If the Warehouse will not hand your 2022 install the library, CleanUp³ cannot load at all.

What each menu item actually does

Extensions » CleanUp³ holds eight items:

• Clean… — opens the settings dialog, then runs everything you ticked.
• Clean with Last Settings — re-runs your saved tick boxes with no dialog at all. This is the real “one click” cleanup, and the item worth a keyboard shortcut.
• Erase Hidden Geometry, Erase Stray Edges, Geometry to Layer0, Merge Faces, Merge Materials, Repair Edges — six single-purpose runs, each ignoring the rest of your settings.

Scope is the one setting that is never remembered. It is flagged no-save and recalculated from what you are doing at that moment: something selected → Selected; nothing selected but you are inside a group or component → Local; otherwise → Model. So “Clean with Last Settings” reuses your options but not your scope — double-click into a component first and the clean stays inside it. One detail follows from this: the duplicate-component-name repair only runs in Model scope.

Every setting in the CleanUp³ dialog, with its default

The dialog is a 290 × 785 pixel window built on SketchUp’s legacy WebDialog API, which is why it looks dated. It is resizable and SketchUp remembers the size you leave it at, but it is created with scrolling switched off — so on a screen under about 800 pixels tall, or once you have shrunk it, the bottom rows become unreachable rather than scrollable. Drag it taller instead.

General

• Scope — Model / Local / Selected, as above.
• Validate Results (on) — runs SketchUp’s own Fix Problems check afterwards. Its tooltip reads “Recommended! (Windows only. OSX users should run Fix Problems manually.)”, and the code matches: on Mac the tick does nothing. It also has to run outside the cleanup operation, so it adds its own separate entry to the undo stack.
• Show Statistics (on) — the summary box at the end: edges reduced, faces reduced, purged components / layers / materials / styles, skipped locked definitions, elapsed time. Untick it and the same report still prints to the Ruby Console.

Optimisations

• Purge Unused (on) — components, layers/tags, materials, styles. It runs twice in one clean: once before the geometry work, again at the end, because merging faces can leave more definitions unused.
• Erase Hidden Geometry (off) — off by default for good reason: hidden geometry is usually hidden on purpose.
• Erase Duplicate Faces (off) — its tooltip opens with “Warning: Very slow!”. It hunts faces occupying the same space, so leave it off unless you know the model has overlaps. When it is on, the coplanar merge runs a second time after it.

Layers

• Geometry to Layer0 (off) — moves loose edges and faces to Layer0/Untagged. It transfers visibility first: anything invisible only because its tag was switched off is explicitly set to hidden before the tag is cleared, so turning tags back on later does not resurrect it.

Materials

• Merge Identical Materials (off) — this one ignores Scope and processes every material in the model, exactly as its tooltip warns. “Identical” means same colour, same alpha, same material type, and for textures the same file name plus the same width, height and pixel dimensions — so two copies of one texture at different scales are correctly left alone.
• Ignore Attributes (on) — ignores attribute dictionaries when comparing materials. Those dictionaries are where render engines keep their data, so untick this if V-Ray or Enscape settings ride on your materials.

Coplanar Faces

• Merge Coplanar Faces (on) — the headline job: erase the edge between two faces lying in the same plane.
• Ignore Normals (off) — when on, faces pointing in opposite directions can still merge.
• Ignore Materials (off) — when on, faces merge despite different materials.
• Ignore UV (on — the surprising default) — with it on, textured faces merge even when their texture mapping does not line up across the edge, so a tiled or per-face-positioned texture can visibly jump. Untick it when texture alignment matters more than face count: CleanUp³ then compares the UV at both ends of the edge, front and back, before erasing anything.

Edges

• Repair Split Edges (on) — rejoins one edge that SketchUp fragmented into collinear pieces.
• Erase Stray Edges (on) — edges attached to no face, plus the odd SketchUp case of an edge attached to the same face more than once. Edges lying on the cutting plane of a cutting component are protected, so door and window cutouts survive.
• Remove Edge Materials (off) — clears materials painted onto edges themselves.
• Smooth Edges by Angle (0, i.e. off) — above zero it softens and smooths any two-face edge whose faces’ normals differ by less than that many degrees. Mind the convention: the angle is measured between the normals, so 0° means perfectly flat and a bigger number softens more of the fold.

Why some “extra” edges never disappear

Merge Coplanar Faces is not a sweep over surfaces. It tests one edge at a time and erases it only when every one of these holds, in this order:

1. The edge has exactly two faces. Three faces on one edge — a wall meeting a slab, an internal corner, anything T-shaped — is an automatic keep.
2. The two faces point the same way (merely parallel is enough if Ignore Normals is on).
3. They are not two faces built on the same set of vertices.
4. Neither face is a sliver whose outer-loop edges are all parallel — a deliberate guard against a SketchUp bug that loses geometry when such faces merge.
5. Front and back materials match on both faces and, unless Ignore UV is on, the texture is continuous across the edge.
6. All vertices of both faces fit a single plane.

Rule 1 alone explains most leftovers: the edge you wanted gone is holding a third face somewhere along its length.

The whole clean is a single undo

Everything from the first purge to the last runs inside one SketchUp operation, so one Ctrl+Z (Cmd+Z) puts the model back. The only exception is Validate Results, which runs outside that operation and needs a second undo. Save first anyway: a clean on a big model is not quick, and Erase Duplicate Faces is slow by design.

Locked geometry is skipped — by definition, not by instance

CleanUp³ collects locked groups and components before it starts and reports the total as “Skipped Locked Definitions”. The mechanism cuts both ways, because locking is resolved per component definition and everything nested inside a locked definition is marked locked too. Lock one instance of a component and every instance of it in the model is excluded from the clean — an excellent way to protect a supplier’s model, and the usual reason a clean seems to have done nothing.

What CleanUp³ cannot reduce

Every face-reducing step in CleanUp³ needs faces that are flat and in the same plane, or faces that are literal duplicates. That rules out exactly the models that make SketchUp lag hardest:

• Curved surfaces — a cylinder, a fillet, a Sandbox terrain. Adjacent triangles sit at an angle to each other, so nothing merges.
• Imported meshes — FBX, OBJ or GLB from 3ds Max, Blender, a 3D scan or a photogrammetry capture. They arrive triangulated and organically curved.
• High-poly 3D Warehouse furniture — the classic case of one sofa costing more triangles than the building around it.

Run CleanUp³ on those and the statistics box honestly reports 0 faces reduced. That is not a fault. Reducing a curved mesh is a different operation — decimation, which rebuilds the surface out of fewer, larger triangles while keeping its shape.

So if your file is slow to orbit rather than merely large on disk, triangle count is the cause, and Decimify, our polygon reducer for SketchUp, is the step CleanUp³ does not cover. Select exactly one group or component, drag a slider that targets a share of the original triangles per sub-mesh, watch the result live, then commit it back. The commit refills that component definition in place, so every instance updates at once and the entire commit is one undo. It needs a free 3dshouse account: free gives every option at every reduction level with 3 exports or commits per UTC day; Pro is $30 one-time and one purchase covers both the SketchUp extension and the browser app. For a .glb or .stl that is not in SketchUp yet, simplify the mesh in your browser first — nothing is uploaded, the reduction runs on your own machine.

Which tool fixes which cause of a heavy SketchUp file

• Big .skp, performance fine — unused components, materials, styles and tags still stored in the file. Fix: Purge Unused, or CleanUp³ with Purge Unused ticked.
• Messy but light geometry — stray edges, split edges, edges chopping one flat wall into dozens of faces, overlapping duplicate faces. Fix: CleanUp³, this page.
• Geometry that misbehaves — groups that refuse to become solid, duplicate edges and faces stacked on each other. Fix: FixIt 101.
• Slow orbit, slow section cuts, slow export — too many triangles, from curves, imports, scans or Warehouse furniture. Fix: decimate. Neither purging nor cleaning moves this number at all.

FAQ

Why is the CleanUp extension not showing up in SketchUp?

Three causes, most likely first. TT_Lib² is missing or older than 2.11.0, in which case CleanUp³ loads no menu and reports no error. You are looking in the wrong menu — the items are under Extensions » CleanUp³. Or you are hunting a toolbar: there is none, only menu items.

Does the CleanUp plugin purge unused items in SketchUp?

Yes. Purge Unused is ticked by default and covers components, layers/tags, materials and styles, and it runs twice per clean. If purging is all you need, the standalone purge route is faster than a full clean.

Does CleanUp³ work on SketchUp 2022 and 2024?

The Warehouse listing for 3.4.6 covers 2022 through 2026 on Windows and Mac. Its required library TT_Lib² is listed for 2023–2027, so on SketchUp 2022 confirm the Warehouse actually installs TT_Lib² for you — without it CleanUp³ does not load.

Download CleanUp³

Take it free from the official CleanUp³ Extension Warehouse listing, and install TT_Lib² before it — the same 3.4.6 build is also on the SketchUcation PluginStore. Restart SketchUp after installing, then check Extensions » CleanUp³. If that submenu is missing, TT_Lib² is the thing to fix.