How to make a Spanish "Barrel Tile" roof
By: Rob Terry
Software: 3DStudio MAX / Photoshop
This is a fairly basic tutorial on how to create a Spanish tile roof. The assumption that your knowledge of 3DStudio is at or near the intermediate level has been made. Disclaimer: This is my first tutorial so I apologize if it's too basic or not basic enough.
Every project has is own parameters i.e. distance from subject, timeframe, etc. which force us to make decisions
about the level of needed detail of a particular image. As with many things in life, nice things often come at a cost
and adding Spanish roof tile to your scene is no exception when it comes to render times and viewport maneuverability
due to the aggregate number of faces inherent to a nicely detailed Spanish barrel tile.
This tutorial is designed to let you make the decision of just how detailed you want (or need) your roof to be, however my goal is to find that happy medium of acceptable detail for close-ups without having a roof with 1.5 million faces which believe me can happen very quickly with this type of roof.
Step 1. Create tile shape.
Note: I set my grid spacing to 1" so I could get accurate measurements while I worked.
-Create an arc spline that was 4" diameter and entered 360 and 180 in the From/To boxes and name the Spline accordingly i.e. SpanishTile01
-Add an Edit Spline modifier and refined the arc to add the "lip" part on the right. (See Fig. 01)
Figure 01
-In the Edit Spline>Spline sub-object level, I added a 1" outline to the shape so it looks like this. (See Fig. 02)
Figure 02
Step 2. Extrude
-Add an Extrude modifier to extrude the shape to 18"
Step 3. Taper
-Apply a Taper modifier and enter the amount of -0.2. I checked the limit effect radio button and entered an upper Limit of 9" so only the rear of the tile would taper inwards without the front simultaneously tapering outwards which we don't want. Make sure the Taper Gizmo is centered and you may need to rotate the gizmo 180 degrees so you taper the back in, not the front out.
-your shape should be looking like this: (See figure 03)
Figure 03
-If you were to check the poly count now we'd be at 228; that's with spline steps set to the default which is 6. Multiply those numbers by 2 or 3 thou and you can see how this could get out of control.. See image below for different step interpolations.
Now we need to ask ourselves just how close you're really going to ever get to this roof because we're going to start chopping this thing apart.
If you have a Quad motherboard with 4 Pentium5 6.8Ghz processors and the Mack Daddy of all graphics cards, you could skip the next few steps but
you probably don't so optimizing here will be well worth the effort.