Here I made a stick that can have various angles on the ends for my soffit project:
Stick.skp (34.5 KB)
A positive number like 45 makes an inside corner and a negative number like -45 makes an outside corner
As someone who draws literally hundreds of roofs per year, I can appreciate the methods here, but I can do in 5 seconds what some of you claim takes several minutes at least. The Instant Roof plugin changed my life. It does both gable and hip roofs, and even does mansard roofs, dutch gables, and more. As for the flexibility, it is excellent. You can always just explode the resulting geometry and adjust things to your liking. If you need an exact profile for a gutter or something, the Profile Builder 2 plugin is your answer.
I’m all for knowing how to do it the old fashioned way, but when it comes to actually doing business, time is money and these plugins are easily worth the price of admission.
If you insist on doing it the "old fashioned way, there is an easier way. Extend your profiles further up where the width of the profile is at least as long as half of the longest wall. Then use the follow me tool. No you can select all roof geometry and do Intersect With Model. Then delete the extra geometry, which is far easier than extending hip lines.
Here is a video example:
And here is what it looks like with Instant Roof:
If anyone wants and example of how to do X with Instant Roof, let me know and I’ll try to posts a video response.
One more tip… I don’t think anyone mentioned the way to get the right roof pitch. The protractor tool accepts roof pitch inputs, so you can put in 5:12 instead of 22.6 degrees to get the exact x in 12 angle.
As does the Rotated Rectangle tool.
Shep
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Great tip -I did not know that.
Yes I certainly agree that Instant Roof is the way to go and if I where concerned about being productive I would have already bought it. I have other software that I use for real projects.
Anyway this project gives me an opportunity to play with and learn DC’s and also learn good things from you experienced users.
Thanks
Thank you for sharing all that good stuff!!!
Hi, glad too hear someone is finding useful or interesting info hear.
I have re-evaluated my stick component to hopefully be more adaptable.
A stick is a very commonly used item in building. It can be a 2x4 or a piece of plywood or molding or whatever.
I decided that a stick always has a front, back, left and right.
A stick basically has eight points which need to be defined and forms six faces. It would be much better if I could simply define the eight points without having to hide the angled ends or stretch the object but I do not see how that is possible with DC’s.
Stretching a DC seems to stretch any texture applied to it -which usually creates an undesirable result.
Stick.skp (34.5 KB)
I suppose a complicated piece of molding would have many more points which would need to be defined.
Hi Guys, nice work Cris it is helpful, I like what you have done thanks. I do have another alternative that is very very quick and parametric. I will try and make it a GIF yet here is a quick video that I did on the same shape
This is only a very small part of PlusSpec, essentially we made SketchUp perform like the top 2 BIM companies in the world. I am a designer and builder (24 years) and I needed Sketchup to do the grunt work for me so I could show clients the intention of the design and use the same model for documentation and specification of products. There is a US version on our website. http://www.plusspec.com/ If anyone is confused by BIM or VDC this may help explain it. I hope it helps. 
There is no question that PlusSpec appears to be amazing in many ways, but the cost, which is more than Sketchup Pro itself, is prohibitive for just this functionality. If you plan to use the full suite of PlusSpec tools, I can see paying the price. For my work on modeling roofs, I can’t justify it when there are other tools and methods that are almost as functional.
It’s too bad that PlusSpec is not more modular, because I can definitely see paying for a subset of the tools it offers. I would also like to see a free trial, which I don’t believe exists.
Hi AndrewRubySketch,
Yes, I have been looking at PluSpec because it seems to address many of the goals i would want to accomplish with my DC’s in one complete package.
How does this program handle variation?
One of the things that attracted me to investigate SketchUp is it’s ability to adapt -but in my little experience I can see that it is very difficult to program a soffit system which can be as varied as a real one may be.
I would assume that like other task specific solutions (Revit, CheifArchitect, ArchiCad, etc.) there is a trade off between ease of handling common situations and customization.
As an example we use shadow boards on our fascias here which you probably do not use. Is there a simple way to add that?