Back-Face Painter

If you like working with SketchUp styles that hide edges and profiles—as I do—you’ve probably run into an annoying problem: backface colors bleeding through your geometry.

When backfaces are a different color than the front face, and you disable edges (for a cleaner, more realistic look), you may notice strange patches, shadows, or colors that shouldn’t be there. This issue is even more noticeable in SketchUp Pro 2025, where PBR materials and HDRI lighting make even subtle face orientation differences stand out.

BackFace Painter is the tool I built to fix this problem—quickly and automatically.

Select any faces, groups, or components, and this extension will instantly paint all the backfaces inside them. You don’t have to open nested geometry or manually navigate your camera inside the model anymore.

You can choose from three painting modes:

✅ Transparent Material (Recommended)

• Makes backfaces fully invisible
• Best option for SketchUp 2025’s PBR + HDRI workflows
• Prevents all bleed-through, even in complex lighting conditions

✅ Same Material as Front Face

• Copies the front face material onto the backface
• Effectively eliminates bleed-through in most traditional SketchUp workflows
• Great option if you're not using photoreal materials

⚠️ SketchUp’s Default Material

• Resets backfaces to the default material
• Does not fix bleed-through and may worsen it if the default color contrasts with front faces

Why I Created It

I personally prefer to display my SketchUp models with no edges or profile edges enabled. It gives my work a cleaner, more elegant look—but it also makes backface issues way more visible. After spending too much time manually fixing this, I built BackFace Painter to automate it all with one click.

Key Features

• Eliminates backface bleed-through when using edge-free styles
• Ideal for clean visuals in presentations, renders, or client work
• Fully compatible with SketchUp 2025’s PBR + HDRI materials
• No need to open nested groups/components—just select and go
• Paint entire models at once—faces, groups, or components
• Choose from:
  • Transparent backfaces (best for rendering)
  • Front-face match (best for non-PBR workflows)
  • Default material (reset only – not for fixing bleed)
• Speeds up cleanup and improves visual quality instantly