Replace Material in SketchUp Across Entire Model — Fast Tool

Replacing a material in SketchUp across the entire model with the default tools is slow once a model has many materials, because the native workflow is scattered: you either Alt-sample with the Paint Bucket and repaint, or right-click a face and run Select > All with same material, or open the Materials panel and use Replace. The replace material tool from 3dshouse rolls this into a fast two-click swap so you can clean up dozens of materials in one pass.

A few things worth knowing before you start, because they trip up even experienced users:

• Native SketchUp only replaces matching materials inside the currently open editing context — faces buried inside groups and components keep their old material unless you enter each one, which is exactly the tedium this tool removes by working across the whole model at once.
• The Materials panel right-click menu still has no “Replace” command (it only offers Edit, Duplicate, Save As and Delete) — the global replace lives behind the Edit panel’s eyedropper/paint icons, which is why most people never find it. This has been an open feature request for years.
• Replacing a material in SketchUp does not purge the old one automatically — the original swatch stays in your “In Model” list as an unused material, so run Purge Unused afterward to actually shrink the file and tidy the list.

Note that SketchUp moved to named-user subscriptions in 2020 (no new perpetual licenses), and the current release is SketchUp 2026; the steps below work the same across recent versions.

How to Replace Material in SketchUp Across All Groups and Components

Steps by steps:

• Select click the material you want to replace, step 2 – select click the material replaced
• Repeat for other material.

Nguyen Huu Khanh

Architect turned developer