I am just learning to use Sketchup, but I am not sure that it will do what I am looking for. I tired Googling it, but I must not be using the right terms.
I am looking to make pieces (pipe tees, elbows, electric valves, hose…) and combine them into a model. Then print out a drawing or schematic of the model with arrows to each part that referenced a bill of materials. I was also able to display some components as a wireframe so you could see the layout behind it.
In the past I thought myself how to use Solidworks, and it worked very well for this. I know longer have access to it Solidworks.
Will a Make or Pro do this, or should I keep looking?
Make should do well for all the modeling. Doing your drawings with callouts and BOM can be done with Make, but is FAR easier with Pro since Pro includes Layout - which really should be seen as the essential companion to Make when you need decent drawings without excessive effort.
Feature wise? SU Make should suffice, but Pro would add the ability to create Dynamic Components (Make include non-dynamic component creation) which might be useful to combine multiple sizes of fittings into a single component.
Suggestion: Start with PRO - and it’s 30 day free trial. Play with using Layout for documents vs doing it all within Sketchup. That will let you see the difference - and whether or not the price of PRO will be worth it for you.
One caveat: If you intend ANY commercial use you’ll have to go Pro. This includes in house use for any business.
if you need volume modeling in the MCAD area incl. model to sheet, bill of material and exchange data via 3D CAD formats as STEP, SAT or IGES etc. check ViaCAD.
Welcome to the forums @rvos! SketchUp is certainly capable of making the type of pieces you are describing and putting them together in a final model. There are plenty of different types of pipe components on the 3D warehouse and even a few extensions that are designed specifically to help generate pipes and provide a BOM.
If you have not already done so, try downloading SketchUp Make and play around with some of the tools and see what you can do. If you have any questions or get stuck on something, please feel free to ask on the forums, we are here to help you learn! There is also the knowledge center and official youtube channel to help you out if you want to give those a try.
In short, SketchUp can do what you want it to, but you need to be willing to spend some time learning it. Try the free version and see what you can do. Ask questions if you are stuck (I really do love helping people learn to use SketchUp). I look forward to hearing from you in the future, hopefully about a successful project.