Nova Snap

What Nova Snap does

Getting a clean, marked-up image out of SketchUp usually means a detour: screen-grab the view, drop it into another app, draw on it, measure by eye, export, and hope the dimensions are right. It’s slow, it breaks your focus, and the numbers are only as good as your guesswork.

Nova Snap removes the detour. It captures the active SketchUp view at crisp, true-to-screen resolution and lets you annotate and dimension right on top — without ever leaving the model. Markups, labels and measurements are produced inside SketchUp and saved straight to your project, so a clean image is seconds away instead of a five-app round trip.

Because it reads the real geometry, the dimensions are honest. Nova Snap measures from the model itself and is occlusion-aware — it won’t dimension parts hidden behind others — so the images you hand to a client, a contractor or your own site notes say exactly what the model says. And because it knows every part, it goes further than markup: one click builds a saw-ready cut list or a merchant-ready order list from the parts in view. Built by a Norwegian building design company, it’s tuned for real AEC work, not demos.

Key features

• True-to-view screenshots — capture the active SketchUp view at the resolution you actually see, with no quality loss and no external screen-grab tools.
• Draw and mark up in place — freehand pen, straight and curved lines, callout notes and six colors, directly over the captured view.
• Accurate dimensioning from the model — bounding-box dimensions per part, single-edge dimensions, and true 3D corner-to-corner measurements with chain mode for repeating spacing (cc 600). Dimensions arrange themselves in tidy lanes like a drawing sheet.
• Occlusion-aware measuring — Nova Snap ignores parts hidden behind others, keeping your dimensions tied to what’s genuinely visible.
• Cut list in one click — every visible piece gets a color-coded label in the image and a table row with length, cross-section and the cut angle at each end, read from the actual end-face geometry.
• Order list — identical pieces grouped with quantities, ready to paste into an e-mail to the timber merchant. Both tables also copy tab-separated straight into Excel.
• Detail labels — leader lines from every part to name + cross-section labels in the margins: an instant labelled assembly drawing. Click parts to include or exclude them.
• Multi-view contact sheet — six framed views (four sides, iso, vertical section) with real overall dimensions in one image; perfect for design review or pasting into an AI chat.
• Export part to CAD/AI — isolate a selected part and get 3D DWG/DXF, true 2D projections and a JSON parts manifest in one step, without touching your model.
• One-step save and share — finished images go straight to your project folder or the clipboard.
• English and Norwegian — the interface follows your SketchUp language automatically.

Use cases

• Client presentations — turn a model view into a clear, annotated image that explains a design decision at a glance, no CAD knowledge required from the reader.
• Site notes and crew handoffs — a dimensioned image on the crew’s phones answers “what’s the spacing here?” before anyone has to call the office.
• Cut lists at the saw station — print or send the coded cut list; every stick in the image carries its own label, so the person cutting matches T1-03 in the table to T1-03 in the picture.
• Ordering material — the grouped order list is the exact text a timber merchant wants: quantity, length, cross-section, name.
• Markup and review (RFIs) — circulate a captured view with arrows, notes and honest measurements so engineers and consultants respond to something concrete.
• Fabrication and detail drawings — capture a junction with corner-to-corner dimensions and detail labels for the workshop.
• AI-assisted design review — copy the multi-view contact sheet into ChatGPT or Claude and the AI sees your design from every side with true dimensions in a single paste.
• CAD hand-over — export an isolated part as DWG/DXF + JSON for the steel fabricator, the CNC shop or a script.
• Teaching and apprentices — annotated step images straight from the model make assembly instructions cheap to produce.
• Fast documentation — log design states and decisions as tidy images that slot straight into reports, meeting minutes or the project archive.
• Issue tracking — snap and annotate a problem area to flag it clearly for follow-up, keeping the question and the visual together.

Who it’s for

Nova Snap is for architects, engineers, builders and SketchUp users who need to communicate from their models every day — anyone who turns a view into a client image, a markup, a cut list, a site note or a piece of documentation and wants it accurate, clean and done without leaving SketchUp.

What you get

• nova-snap.rbz (works in SketchUp 2023+)
• Bundled user guide (PDF) — also available here
• 7-day free trial, full functionality
• 12 months of free updates
• Email support

System requirements

• SketchUp 2023, 2024, 2025, or 2026
• Windows 10/11 or macOS 12+

License

One-time purchase, perpetual license — use forever, offline, locked to your machine. Includes all v2.x updates for 12 months and one free re-activation if you switch computers.