Once you’ve modeled your project in SketchUp you can pry out quite a bit of information. You can create dimensioned drawings to use as a plan and of course make reports like cut lists. If you have pieces with curves or other details you might benefit from printing full sized patterns. If you are using SketchUp Pro you’ll have LayOut which is well-suited for this sort of thing. You can choose a page size that suits the size of the patterns and once set up, export a PDF which you can then print yourself or send to someone who has a large format printer.

If you prefer to print directly from SketchUp or you don’t have access to LayOut, you can still print full size. In this video I show a quick and easy way to set things up for that.

In the video I used an extension that draws the component bounding box with guide geometry. It’s optional here but I think it’s quite handy for not only this but for other things. You can get Draw BoundingBox from the Extension Warehouse.

–Dave