SketchUp is a great tool. I know guys who basically live in it. But watch somebody build a masonry shop drawing in SketchUp and you see the problem in about thirty seconds: they're drawing boxes. SketchUp doesn't know it's a wall.
It draws geometry, not masonry
A box in SketchUp is a box whether it's a CMU, a countertop, or a kitchen cabinet. The model has no idea what a course is. It doesn't know what bond is, that a corner needs a different unit than the field, that the wall has to land on an 8-inch module, or that an opening cuts the coursing a certain way. SketchUp will draw anything — which is exactly why it knows nothing about masonry specifically.
So you supply all of it. By hand. Block by block. Every unit is geometry you place and align yourself, and the model takes your word for it because it can't tell a stretcher from a sill.
The grind nobody should be doing
Here's where the hours go. You build the wall box by box. Then the height changes — and nothing re-courses. SketchUp doesn't shift the bond or recut the top course, because it never knew there was a bond. You redo it by hand. An opening moves? You re-cut the boxes around it yourself. A finish band changes? You re-color geometry one face at a time.
And when you're finally done, you've got a nice picture of a wall — but no takeoff that knows a corner from a half, because SketchUp was counting shapes, not masonry. So you're back to counting by hand off your own model.
SketchUp will draw you a wall. It won't lay you one. The difference is every block that has to be right — and that's the part it leaves to you.
The model should know it's masonry
None of this is a knock on SketchUp. It's a great general modeler. It's just built to draw anything, and a shop drawing isn't anything — it's a coursed masonry wall that has to be right, course by course, before you're allowed to lay it.
So build it in something that knows that. When the wall is laid course by course in a model that understands bond, the shop drawing and the takeoff fall out of it together — coursing numbered, corners closing, special units in place, halves and cuts counted, finishes banded. You're not modeling boxes and counting them after. You're laying a wall, and the drawing is already done.
That's the whole idea behind masonry shop drawings in The Masonry Modeler: the model knows it's masonry, so you build the wall once and the submittal draws itself.
If you're hand-building shop drawings in SketchUp before you can lay a block, that's the part I'm trying to take off your plate.
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