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Good questions. Difficult for me to answer because there's no way I can objectively set aside nearly two decades spent running CAD.
But Ray's reply may contain a clue. I didn't use the tutorials at all (they're online, and I don't have Intarwebs access at home) and, as stated, produced the model above after about 90 minutes from my first exposure to SketchUp. I immediately understood stuff like the three axes and the functions of most of the tools, so in that sense my CAD experience helped. OTOH and as also stated, I experienced some major frustration trying to use my familiar CAD commands and keyboard shortcuts on SketchUp; in that sense, my CAD background didn't help at all. In fact it was a hindrance.
All in all I would guess that learning SketchUp would be an order of magnitude easier than learning TurboCAD. Obviously my experience with it is quite limited but I'd think that anyone of average intelligence and with a willingness to work through the tutorials should be able to turn out recognizable and usable models within a couple-three hours. If all you want are quick-and-dirty mass studies of your intended projects, you might never need to spend more time learning the program than that. If you want to design everything in great detail, and do so efficiently***, then you'd have to put in more learning time but at this point I'm not qualified to say how much. I have thumbed through our designer's SketchUp Pro manual. Like many applications -- Word, Excel, whatever -- the basics of SketchUp are dead simple but it looks to me like it can go as deep as you want to go. Then again this is the paid Pro version; it may do a lot of stuff the free version won't, I don't know.
(*** I have no doubt that, at this point, I'm doing many things the hard way, because I don't yet know the quickest/easiest methods.)
I suggest you download it, try it, see what happens. You've nothing to lose but a little bit of your time.
But Ray's reply may contain a clue. I didn't use the tutorials at all (they're online, and I don't have Intarwebs access at home) and, as stated, produced the model above after about 90 minutes from my first exposure to SketchUp. I immediately understood stuff like the three axes and the functions of most of the tools, so in that sense my CAD experience helped. OTOH and as also stated, I experienced some major frustration trying to use my familiar CAD commands and keyboard shortcuts on SketchUp; in that sense, my CAD background didn't help at all. In fact it was a hindrance.
All in all I would guess that learning SketchUp would be an order of magnitude easier than learning TurboCAD. Obviously my experience with it is quite limited but I'd think that anyone of average intelligence and with a willingness to work through the tutorials should be able to turn out recognizable and usable models within a couple-three hours. If all you want are quick-and-dirty mass studies of your intended projects, you might never need to spend more time learning the program than that. If you want to design everything in great detail, and do so efficiently***, then you'd have to put in more learning time but at this point I'm not qualified to say how much. I have thumbed through our designer's SketchUp Pro manual. Like many applications -- Word, Excel, whatever -- the basics of SketchUp are dead simple but it looks to me like it can go as deep as you want to go. Then again this is the paid Pro version; it may do a lot of stuff the free version won't, I don't know.
(*** I have no doubt that, at this point, I'm doing many things the hard way, because I don't yet know the quickest/easiest methods.)
I suggest you download it, try it, see what happens. You've nothing to lose but a little bit of your time.
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