Sketch-up question

Carol Reed

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Is there a way to draw a 2-D drawing, as would be used with diagrams and such? How?

I want to draw out an electrical circuit.
 
Window, Preferences, Template, allows you to set a default template of "Plan View" in feet and inches. It is essentially a top down view that you can do from other templates, just don't rotate the "space" along anything but the X and Y axis and it will look sort of like Visio and other 2D programs . . . emphasis on the "sort of". ;-)
 
Carol, as Glenn points out, you can choose a template from the template collection for this. An alternative it to just choose the top view and set Camera to Parallel Projection. This will give you a proper 2D view as long as you avoid orbiting the camera. That's what Glenn means by "don't rotate the 'space'".

Here are some 2D electrical symbols you can use. Not a lot of them but perhaps most of what you need.
 
Thanks, guys,

I'll make a template just for diagrams.

And thanks, Dave for reminding me of the 'warehouse.' I didn't plan on using symbols, but rather pictures of the actual items (in some cases) and 2D drawings of the items in others. In other words a diagram anyone can follow. Light on words and heavy on graphics.

So a follow-up question would be, can one create a private 'library' of related stuff? Searching the warehouse can get tedious.

One that comes immediately to mind would be a library of construction lumber. I have to rebuild my deck next summer and I wanted to try a different design. It would so cool to grab a 2 x 6, (or other dimensioned lumber) copy it, cut it as necessary, and paste it into place, as an example. That also helps my thought process and reveals a process to follow in the building. For me that means cutting far fewer pieces to the wrong size!
 
That's an option but there's nothing wrong with using SketchUp for the task if you have it. My guess is if you want to make the drawing to scale, you can do that more easily in SketchUp, too.
 
For 2D, why not just use Paint (for windows users)? I assume there is something similar for MAC.

Paint is a bitmap editor and thus anything you create will scale badly if you want to expand it or print it with decent quality. Using any one of the hundreds of vector art programs will generally be much more useful.

I use LineForm on my Mac quite a bit since it can read PDFs and break them up into individual lines for more editing. That's saved me a few times. There's also a public domain prog called InkScape that runs on mac, windows and linux/unix. It's pretty capable but the UI is.... well it looks almost as nasty as windows to me. It can do some clever stuff with multiple colour gradients that allowed me to make some spectacular decals for one of my model airplanes.
 
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