How to make a Spanish "Barrel Tile" roof
By: Rob Terry
Software: 3DStudio MAX / Photoshop
Page 02
Step 4. Optimize
-Go back through the modifier stack to the arc and set the Steps to 3 in the Interpolation dropdown. 2 or 1 steps is even better if you can get away with it! 3 is the happy medium I believe.
-Clone your tile and hide it for future use or to revert back to if we screw up. Actually we're gonna need it soon enough, be sure you copy and don't instance!
*The first course-or horizontal row-of our tile is going to be a tad higher rez than the additional courses because the lack of detail will be much harder to notice once we get past that first course.
-Apply an Edit Mesh modifier to the top of the modifier stack and check select by polygon. Select ALL the faces on the underside of the tile and delete them. Also get the rear polygon and the side polygon and delete them too so that you only can see the front plane and top of the tile. (See Figure 4)
Figure 4
Step 5. The 2nd Course
-go ahead and unhide the clone you made of your tile before you deleted the faces. Move the 2nd tile back so that it overlaps the optimized tile by about an inch.
-We're going to optimize this one just like we did to the previous tile but first were going to go back and reduce the arc steps to further reduce poly count. Change Step count of arc to 2. Then repeat Step 4. We'll have 60% less faces to process on these 2 tiles together than we would have had on just the one default extruded arc. It all helps trust me. (See figure 5)
Figure 5
-Open the Hierarchy tab and select Affect Pivot only and proceed to align the pivot point of the 2nd tile to the rear and bottom extent of the 2nd tile. (See Figure 6)
Figure 6
Step 6. Rotate 2nd Tile
-Rotate 2nd tile just enough to create a ridge between to two tiles. Don't over-rotate so that there is a gap. (See Figure 7)
Figure 7
Step 7. Duplicate
You'll need to know roughly how big your roof needs to be in order to know just how much duplication you'll need to do. For instance in this tutorial we're going to build a four-sided peak roof to fit a 20'x20' building. (See Figure 8) (We'll save conical shaped roofs for another tutorial.)
Figure 8
Our roof will have a peak height of 5 feet so we'll need to copy the 2nd tile which is 18" with a 1" overlap enough to cover the 11'2" (135") front roof plane. I think 6 copies will do the trick. We already have the first course which is 18" and the 2nd course which because of the 1" overlap is 17". 6 x 17 = 102 + 18(1st tile) + 17(2nd tile) = 137. Don't worry too much about this because sometime we'll want to roof to overhang a half a foot, etc. and we're going to chop off excess anyway so just make sure you copy enough to AT LEAST fill the space required.
Our tiles are 11 inches wide but we'll have some overlapping laterally so figure the tile taking up about 9" of space width-wise. On a 20' roof we'll need approximately 24 vertical runs of tile accounting for the corner tiles and our existing vertical run. 9" tiles x 24 = 216" or 18' leaving approximately 7.5 inches to spare on either side to allow for the corner pieces that we'll get to later.
Vertical Copies
-On the Y axis, Shift-drag the second tile back to create another clone of the second tile. Make sure there is approx. a 1" overlap and enter 6 in the total copies spinner of the clone options dialog box. This will give you a total now of 8 tiles running vertically.
Horizontal Copies
Now select ALL 8 of those tile and Shift drag on the X axis about 9" to create a clone of the vertical run which leaves an overlap of about 2" and enter 24 in the total copies spinner of the clone options dialog box. This will give you a total now of 25 vertical runs running horizontally.
-Hopefully your scene looks something like this:
