How to make baseboards and ceiling cornices in SketchUp? Three methods!

Publication date: 25-09-2026  |  Update date: 11-09-2026  | Author: Piotr Kurpiewski

You can create baseboards and ceiling cornices in SketchUp in three ways: using the Follow Me tool, with ready-made components from the 3D Warehouse, or with the Magic Molding plugin, which generates profiles automatically. Each method has a different time cost and level of control over the result. In this article, I go through all three using the same room as an example and show their strengths and weaknesses.

Where to start drawing moldings in SketchUp?

The most important thing is proportion. The same molding that looks natural in a historic building will start to feel overwhelming in an apartment with a 250 cm ceiling.

For a standard room height of 250–270 cm, designers usually stick to baseboards in the range of 8–12 cm. In low rooms, where every centimeter of wall counts, they go down to 4–6 cm. Above three meters you can go up to 15 cm, and in even taller historic interiors even 20 cm, because a low molding gets lost there.

The same logic applies to cornices: the lower the ceiling, the more subtle the profile. A bulky 25 cm-high profile in a room with a 250 cm ceiling visually shrinks the space. So before you start drawing anything, check the room’s height in your model and choose the correct profile. You’ll save yourself modeling effort.

Method 1: creating moldings in SketchUp with the native Follow Me tool (Extrude Along)

Follow Me is a tool that drags a flat profile along a designated path. In practice it works opposite to real-life installation. A carpenter first cuts the molding at a 45° angle, then fits it to the wall. In SketchUp, you define the path first, and the molding only appears at the end, already with the miters.

The complete procedure for a baseboard in a rectangular room is as follows:

1. Enter the room group or create a new one. SketchUp’s documentation clearly states that the selected path and the profile must be in the same context. A profile drawn outside the group may have different base properties and won’t behave as you expect.
2. Draw the profile cross-section of the molding at one of the corners, on a plane perpendicular to the wall. The profile doesn’t have to touch the path but must be at a right angle to it.
3. Double-click on the floor face to select it, then deselect the interior face (single left-click while holding Shift or Ctrl+Shift). SketchUp will treat the floor edge as the path, which is much faster than clicking each edge one by one with Shift held.
4. Activate the Follow Me tool from the toolbar or the top menu and click on the profile face. The molding will travel around the entire room, creating automatic corner cuts.

What’s wrong with the Follow Me tool in SketchUp?

I’ve compiled the issues that ruin the effect, ordered from the most annoying.

Follow Me often flips faces inside out

If the profile face was angled away from you, the entire molding ends up flipped to its back side. In the modeling view you’ll see the characteristic blue-gray tint, and in a render the faces can disappear or adopt the wrong material. It also has a negative impact on texturing. The fix is to right-click and choose Reverse Faces, but you have to spot it first, which can be hard in a complex model.

Issue with broken paths

Follow Me requires a continuous path. It’s enough for just two edges of the outline not to meet perfectly — for example, one edge created by intersecting walls at a slight angle — and the molding will break at that point. Often it won’t even generate, because SketchUp shows a message that the path is invalid. The official documentation suggests checking for gaps between the lines and closing them if necessary.

Extruding along an arc

With a curved wall, Follow Me doesn’t always keep the profile vertically oriented. On the official SketchUp forum, threads about railings and cornices on arcs usually end with advice to use an external plugin, because the native tool can’t handle it.

Follow Me struggles with a dense, complex path

An arc in SketchUp isn’t a true Bezier curve but a polyline of smaller segments. By default, an arc has 12 segments, and the number of polygons in the finished molding is, roughly speaking, the number of profile edges multiplied by the number of path segments. A profile with twenty edges on an arc of 24 segments already yields nearly five hundred faces in a single run! At high densities, Follow Me can even leave holes.

Why does the baseboard stick to the wall in SketchUp?

New geometry merges with whatever it encounters along the way. A molding generated outside of a group can merge with the floor and cause hard-to-reverse changes. Undoing that can take at least fifteen minutes.

Texturing moldings created with the Follow Me tool

By default, each face in SketchUp gets its own random texture positioning, so wood grain breaks at corners and continues at a different angle. You won’t notice this on a white molding, but on an oak one it’s immediately obvious.

How to create multiple moldings at once with the Follow Me tool?

Follow Me only supports one path at a time. In an apartment with seven rooms you have to repeat the same procedure seven times, each time checking orientation and corners. You can’t create multiple moldings at once.

Does this mean Follow Me is bad? It’s certainly not a perfect tool, and it’s far from the procedural solutions found in more advanced programs like Blender or 3ds Max. Still, it works quite well for unique rotational shapes or a single, custom profile. However, for batch-processing moldings throughout an entire apartment with Follow Me, you need the patience of a saint.

How to make a ceiling cornice in SketchUp using Follow Me?

The procedure for a cornice is almost identical, except you take the path from the ceiling instead of the floor. However, a few things work differently here and it’s worth knowing them before you start modeling.

First, the ceiling outline doesn’t always match the floor outline. Gypsum cladding, a curtain recess, a lowered ceiling above a wardrobe, or a beam below the ceiling can mean the baseboard and the cornice run along two different paths. If you copy a finished molding and move it up, it may not align with your assumptions.

Second, a cornice usually sits against two faces at once — the wall and the ceiling — so its cross-section has a 45° beveled back or two flat seating surfaces. The point where the profile touches the path is no longer obvious. In manual modeling, this means precisely positioning the profile in the corner before you trigger Follow Me.

Third, more and more often a cornice functions as a lighting strip. For the LED tape to cast a soft glow on the ceiling rather than a sharp line, the profile needs to be set a few centimeters (usually 5–8 cm) away from the ceiling, leaving a ledge in the cross-section for the strip. This is a design decision you have to make beforehand. It’s worth marking this recess in the model right away, because later it serves as the location for the light source, e.g. in V-Ray.

The rest of the issues look exactly the same as with a baseboard: perpendicularity, path continuity, face orientation, and arcs.

Method 2: moldings from ready-made components in 3D Warehouse

Since manual modeling takes so much time, maybe it’s enough to download a ready-made model? In the 3D Warehouse library we covered in a separate guide, you’ll find plenty of baseboards and cornices. The problem is, you can rarely use them 1:1.

First, most models are prepared for the American market, so their dimensions are in inches. For example, a molding might be 5.5 inches instead of a straight 12 cm. The length is fixed, usually a few feet, so in a 4.3 meter room you have to copy segments and cut the last one. You still have to do the corners yourself, because the ready component is a straight piece without any angles.

On top of that, there’s the file size of the models.Authors rarely care about optimization, so a single decorative cornice can add more polygons to the model than all the living room furniture.

So when does it make sense? For localized details, such as a rosette under a chandelier, a corbel, or a single pilaster by the fireplace. Wherever the element is singular and does not run along an entire wall, a ready-made component in SketchUp works very well. For trim that runs around the entire apartment, you usually end up fixing more than you gain.

Method 3, or how to automate moulding creation with dedicated plugins

The third path is handing over the repetitive part of the work to an extension. It's worth knowing that you have a few options here with different characteristics.

Eneroth Upright Extruder is free and solves exactly one problem: it keeps the profile from rotating along the path. If you're mainly struggling with railings and cornices on curves, it's worth having. However, you get nothing beyond that. It won't help you with mouldings.

Profile Builder is a paid and much broader solution for parametric modeling of entire assemblies of elements: from fences to structures. Mouldings are one of its many possibilities, as you can tell from the price ($119) and the time needed to master the tool.

Magic Molding was built around a single task. You select edges, choose a cross-section from the library, and click Generate. The library contains nearly one hundred profiles divided into baseboards, cornices, wall moldings with decorative frames, and basic shapes, and before generating you see a semi-transparent preview exactly where the molding will be placed. A grid of nine anchoring points determines which corner of the cross-section attaches to the selected edge, so the cornice fits at the seam of the wall and ceiling, and the baseboard at the seam with the floor, without manual movement.

The things that cause the most headaches with Follow Me are handled here along the way. You can select multiple paths simultaneously and generate moldings throughout the entire apartment in one operation. The PRO version adds texture mapping along the profile, so wood grain flows through the corner without cutting. The plugin also has a FREE variant with the full generation engine and a commercial license, so you can test it on your own project without spending a dime. Installation proceeds in the usual way from an .rbz file, and if you're doing it for the first time, we've described this procedure in the guide on how to install a plugin in SketchUp step by step.

CHECK OUT THE MAGIC MOLDING PLUGIN

Which of all the molding creation methods should you choose for your project?

It comes down to how often you do moldings and how unusual they are.

If moldings appear in your projects sporadically and the project is usually a single rectangular room, stick with Follow Me. It's free, readily available, and twenty minutes once a quarter won't ruin anyone. If you need a single decorative detail, grab a component from 3D Warehouse instead of modeling a rosette from scratch. And if moldings recur in every second project, classical interiors are your specialty, or clients ask for versions with and without moldings, a plugin will pay for itself after the first apartment.

If you're just laying the foundations of your workflow in the program, you'll find these habits in the SketchUp Pro 2026 From Basics for Beginners course.

Summary

Moldings in SketchUp aren't difficult, just tedious, which is a completely different problem. Follow Me can handle any shape, provided you ensure the profile's perpendicularity, path continuity, and plane orientation. Components from the library save time for localized details but cost you time on trim that wraps around. A plugin streamlines the entire process and makes sense when it's part of your regular workflow. Choose the method based on how often you use moldings :)