I used Sketchup to show the wiring specifics of a generator install. I used the Sketchup drawings to create a narrated YouTube video on the topic, the YouTube video is here - YouTube
The name of the video is “Kohler Generator Install”
The Sketchup connection in this video starts at about 20 minutes in.
One can use the arc tool to make 4 differently rotated 90 degree arcs and place them in the Sketchup space. These 4 arcs can be copied, pasted, and “hooked together” in a variety of curves. The scale tool can be applied to the resulting composite of arcs or to isolated sections of the composite to shape the final line into whatever line form you need, with the benefit being that by just using connected together groups of arcs, your line doesn’t tend to get away from you with respect to where it is in space. With the follow me tool, the line can be converted into a cylinder, made into a group, and given a color, and now one has “wires” that can be run all through the drawing to make various points about wiring. One can import a picture of a building, make the picture a texture, put this texture on the side of a 3-D object and now the picture can be reliably moved, rotated, and scaled. This allows one to superimpose the picture on the Sketchup 3D model to demonstrate that the model is appropriately drawn out. Finally, pictures of items from the internet can also be pasted as textures onto 3D blocks, and these blocks can be posted into demo boards of the topic to show how items of the constructed 3D Sketchup space can be correlated to items that are actually real. This allows use of Sketchup to make nice and easlily understood teaching and demo presentattions. I forgot to add why connect an image to a solid object? Well, imported images are 2-D, so its hard to get them to be groups and an advantage of making your structures groups is that groups can be moved around inside of and on top of other groups and they won’t “stick to each other,” in addition, if the image is actually the “color” (added as a texture) of one face of (for example) a rectangular block, then this block has vertices and faces and the move and rotate tools are much easier to apply to this rectangular structure because it has vertices with faces and the faces are all at 90 degrees to each other, so you can scale, move, and rotate this group much easier. And, of course, this means you are scaling, and moving, and rotating your image too. (sorry that I forgot to mention that). And, by the way, that’s why I used the follow me tool to convert my “wires” into cylinders because (again) these cylinders can be converted into groups, and copied and pasted, and rotated and scaled, just as I described for images. (whew) pg