Instant Roof, by Chuck Vali of Vali Architects, is a truly great SketchUp Ruby script. Its purpose is simple – you use Instant Roof to quickly create gables, hips, sheds and trellises anywhere you need them. This script has everything going for it:

It’s easy to install. Pop one file into your plugins folder and you’re done.

It’s easy to learn. Chuck (the script’s author) has put together a huge pile of fantastic instructional PDFs and videos on his website. The in-product help is also comprehensive and well-placed.

It’s easy to use. Everything’s right there in the Plugins menu, so you don’t have to memorize and keep track of a bunch of little tool icons. The input method for telling the script where to put gables and sheds couldn’t be simpler.

To use Instant Roof, you select a face and choose Plugins > Instant Roof > Make Roof. In the following image, I chose to use the California Ranch roof style:

Selecting just a face produces a hip roof.

By default, the script produces an entirely hipped roof; it slopes in all directions. To produce a roof form with a gable, select an edge in addition to the face, then run the script:

Select an edge to tell the script where to draw a gable.

Selecting edges on opposite sides of the building results in gables over both:

Select two edges to create gables on both ends of the roof.

If you select three edges, you end up with a shed:

Selecting three edges produces a shed.

The script handles increased complexity beautifully:

Once I’d wrapped my head around what I was doing, this roof took 3 seconds to generate.

Here’s Chuck showing off Instant Roof on YouTube:

Instant Roof includes a number of roof styles, but they’re all just preset combinations of parameters that you can fiddle with to produce almost anything you need. Slopes, eaves, fascia, rafters – they’e all infinitely adjustable.

The script comes preloaded with a few parameter presets, but you can create and save your own.

And if that’s not enough, Instant Roof can also create a few different roof details: mission tile, shingles, standing seam and sheet metal.

Mission tile and metal standing seam are two of the roof details you can apply with Instant Roof.

Instant Roof comes in two flavors: free and Pro. The latter gives you the ability to choose from a much larger number of roof slopes; that’s critical if you’re using the script to do serious work. At US$39, it’s a bargain. I can only imagine what impact Instant Roof will have on urban designers, art directors, set designers, concept artists and anyone else who needs to whip up convincing built form, quickly.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, this script’s author has done a phenomenal job of creating tutorials that should answer all your questions. Visiting his site will be one of the best things you do today – I guarantee it. Here’s a screenshot of what you can expect to find there:

Visit Chuck’s website for videos and printable help resources galore.

Posted by Aidan Chopra, SketchUp Evangelist

As pointed out by GEB reader ‘robbie’, Google has just pushed out some fresh new imagery!

As is usually the case, you can use Google Maps to determine for sure whether or not a specific area is fresh. This new imagery isn’t in Google Maps yet, so you can compare Earth vs. Maps to see what’s new; the fresh imagery is already in Google Earth, but the old imagery is still in Google Maps. If you compare the two side-by-side and they’re not identical, that means that you’ve found a freshly updated area in Google Earth!

[UPDATED — 3-November, 8:23pm EST]

• Argentina: Various areas — thanks ‘Federico’
• Cameroon: Various, including east of Bafoussam — thanks ‘Munden’
• Ireland: Various cities — thanks ‘robbie’
• Russia: west Kurgan region, east Chelyabinsk region — thanks ‘workdao’
• Ukraine: Various — thanks ‘Chogory’
• United States: Illinois (Springfield), Iowa (Cedar Rapids, Marion), Maryland (Baltimore), Missouri (Saint Joseph) and New York (Long Island — thanks ‘Belmaktor’, ‘Brent’, ‘ChrisK’ and ‘Munden’
• Uruguay: Some imagery in the center of the country — thanks ‘Roberto’

If you find any other updated areas, please leave a comment and let us know!

A few days ago, “Geographic Travels with Catholicgauze” had a great post about the size of the crowd at Jon Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity“.

It seems that conservatives have been passing around an image that shows Glenn Beck’s rally with a much larger crowd, but the images were taken from slightly different viewpoints to make thing look different than they actually were. He uses some great images (with overhead maps) to show that the rallies were roughly the same size.

You’ll want to read his full post to see how he put it all together, but it makes sense.

The reason I bring this up is because GeoEye just released a beautiful high-res image of the crowd that day. While it doesn’t definitively answer the question of which rally was larger (and I’d rather avoid the politics of determining that), it certainly shows quite a huge crowd at Stewart’s rally:

To view it in Google Earth, I’ve taken the high-res version of the image and created an image overlay for it. Download that file and you can zoom down pretty close to check it out.