Architectural rendering is SketchUp's forte. With the many styles available in SketchUp, there is no easier program to create beautiful visualizations. With extensions and external programs that work with SketchUp files, you can create photorealistic renders and augmented reality models. As nice as these outputs are, they are still constrained to the two-dimensional confines of paper and digital screen.

Scale architectural models are incredibly useful in a way that 2D representations simply can't match. Historically, scale models were painstakingly made by hand from foam core board, wood, and the patience of an angel. More recently, laser cutters have made the tedious job of cutting easier, but designing the digital files and assembling the parts is still time consuming and rarely can the SketchUp files be used without major rework.

3D printing alleviates many of these problems. By starting with an existing architectural model, you can quickly...