Aesthetic Appeal:  

Visually SketchUp Pro boasts one of the best-looking and cleanest interfaces. Many 3D design and modeling programs come with seemingly hundreds of tool buttons that do little aside from confusing new users. By default SketchUp Pro displays less than 20 tool buttons on the screen. Furthermore, these buttons are designed so well that there's not much doubt as to their individual functions. An eraser looks like an eraser, the paint bucket looks like a paint bucket, and the tape measure looks like a tape measure.

Whether importing home models or designing your own, chances are you want to add your own touch to them by giving the wood floors a certain wood finish or using a specific brick. A simple Google search for "SketchUp Materials" returns more than a few pages full of links to free materials to download and use in your designs.

Google's 3D Warehouse has 3D models of varying types and quality, but you can sort by user rating and popularity to help separate the high-quality from the low. High quality models are certainly stunning to look at, but be prepared for them to take a bit of a toll on your computer's performance, especially if you barely meet the recommended system requirements. We would advise adding extra RAM and a newer video card with more than 512MB of memory if you're going to use SketchUp Pro.