Nova Geo

What Nova Geo does

Every project starts on a real piece of land — but getting that land into SketchUp is hours of tedious, error-prone work. You hunt for terrain data, trace neighbouring buildings by hand, eyeball the slope, guess at boundaries, and still end up with a model that sits nowhere in particular. Nova Geo removes all of it.

Set one geographic anchor — an address or a coordinate — and Nova Geo builds your real site around it: accurate terrain you can model on, the actual neighbouring buildings in 3D, aerial imagery draped over the ground, road context and your property boundaries. Everything lands in the right place, at the right elevation, oriented to the real world.

It is built by a Norwegian building design company. That means it is tuned for what site context is actually for — early studies, planning applications, neighbour analysis, groundworks and clean BIM hand-off — not as a demo. Site setup that used to eat an afternoon now takes minutes.

Key features

• One-click site setup — go from a bare model to a fully contextualised site in minutes instead of hours of manual tracing and importing.
• Accurate, model-ready terrain — work directly on real ground elevation, with a broad context surface for the surroundings and a fine surface where you build.
• Real 3D neighbouring buildings — see the actual structures around your plot in three dimensions, so massing, shadow and context studies reflect reality.
• Aerial imagery drape — instant, photo-real visual context that makes presentations and early studies read at a glance.
• Property boundaries and road context — your plot lines and surrounding roads brought in correctly, ready to design against.
• Site analysis at your fingertips — read elevation above sea level, slope and sections straight from the panel without leaving SketchUp.
• Proper IFC georeferencing — your model carries its true geographic position into any BIM tool, so it lands correctly in coordinated workflows.

Use cases

• Early site and feasibility studies — drop an anchor and instantly understand the terrain, slope and surroundings before committing a single design decision.
• Planning and building applications — produce context-accurate models and views that show the project in its real setting, the way authorities and neighbours expect to see it.
• Neighbour and context analysis — evaluate massing, sightlines and shadowing against the buildings that are actually there, not placeholder blocks.
• Groundworks and site grading — plan cut, fill and levels on real terrain instead of a flat plane, so earthworks reflect the ground you’ll actually dig.
• Presentation and client buy-in — aerial drape plus real surroundings turn a bare massing model into something a client immediately recognises.
• BIM georeferencing and coordination — anchor the model once so it exports with correct real-world position for IFC and downstream BIM collaboration.

Who it’s for

Nova Geo is for architects, engineers, planners and experienced SketchUp users who design in the real world — anyone in the Norwegian AEC space (and beyond) who needs a project to sit on its actual site, with accurate terrain and genuine context, ready for both presentation and BIM hand-off.

What you get

• nova-geo.rbz (works in SketchUp 2023+)
• User guide (PDF) — installation, every tab, data sources and troubleshooting
• 12 months of free updates
• Email support
• Perpetual licence — use forever
• Pairs perfectly with Nova Landscape

System requirements

• SketchUp 2023, 2024, 2025, or 2026
• Windows 10/11 or macOS 12+ (macOS support is in beta — e-mail us if anything misbehaves and we’ll fix it fast)
• Internet connection for map/terrain data fetch

License

Free 7-day trial, then a one-time purchase: perpetual licence, machine-activated for one computer (one free self-service transfer if you switch machines). Activation is one step — paste the token from your purchase e-mail into the plugin’s licence dialog. Works offline once activated.