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How to make a Spanish "Barrel Tile" roof

Software: 3DStudio MAX / Photoshop

End Result

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. 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

How to make a Spanish "Barrel Tile" roof

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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.

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!

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How to make a Spanish "Barrel Tile" roof

*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

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How to make a Spanish "Barrel Tile" roof

-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.)

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How to make a Spanish "Barrel Tile" roof

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:

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How to make a Spanish "Barrel Tile" roof

Now would be a good time to save your project if you haven't already done so a few times. We're going to attach all the individual tiles together to form on large mesh object. Select the first tile you created-I named mine SpanishTile01- and click on attach list to select all the other tiles in scene. Create a box that is 20'x20' by 10' tall and center it in the world and our tile object so that the tiles are resting on top of the box. This is the building on which our roof will be placed (See Figure 10)

Figure 10

(this is the building on which our roof will be placed)

Step 8. Getting the right Roof Plane Shape

-Since our roof has a pitch, we need to shape our roof tiles accordingly. We'll be using the Slice modifier for this one. Add a slice modifier to your tile mesh and select Slice Plane to activate the Slice Gizmo. rotate the gizmo 50 degrees and move it so that you would be slicing the mesh from the lower right hand corner to the top and middle of the mesh. Check the Remove Bottom radio button to clear all the mesh from the right side of the slice plane. (see Figure 11) Add another Slice modifier to the stack and repeat Step 8 on opposite side.

Figure 11

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How to make a Spanish "Barrel Tile" roof

Step 9. Making the Corner Tiles

To make the corner tiles we're going to make a tube from the standard primitives. the tube should have an outside radius of 5", an inside radius of 4" and the length should be 18". Give it 10 sides and put the slice on from 90 to 270 or whatever makes it a half tube. Now Follow steps 3. through 7 to optimize to tube and make a vertical row that's long enough to start at the corner of our building and end at the top of our roof. It should look something like Figure 12.

Figure 12

Step 10. Align Corner Tiles and Set the Pitch.

If you haven't already done so, attach all the new corner tube tiles to make one object. Set the pivot point of the tube to the minimum of the first tube in the row and position next to the roof. (See Fig. 13)

Figure 13

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How to make a Spanish "Barrel Tile" roof

Next set the pivot point of the roof tile to the very bottom edge and in the middle and rotate the roof 30 degrees to set the pitch. Do the same for the corner tiles and then rotate locally to align corner tiles with roof angle. That should set angle and pitch of both roof and corner tiles. (See Fig 14)

Figure 14

Step 11. Making the other three sides.

In the top Viewport, select both the corner tiles and the roof. Set the reference coordinate system to world and the pivot point to Transform Coordinate Center so that the pivot point will be at the top and middle of our selected objects.. see Fig 15.

Figure 15

Rotate objects 90 degrees and enter 3 in the Total Number of copies in the Clone Dialog box to create the other 3 sides of your roof. So it looks like this. I deleted the extra vertices on the top of the corner tiles. Our roof has only 25336 faces. Of course with more complicated roofs the count will grow but it should still be manageable.

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How to make a Spanish "Barrel Tile" roof

Figure 16

Step 12. Texturing

I'm not going to get too involved in this but for a basic texture, I'll make a reddish clay-like material in the material editor and assign it to the corner pieces. If your tiles should all be the same color you could do the same for them but if they are multi-colored tiles you can make a bitmap in Photoshop about 10 tiles wide by 5 tiles high with each tile representing one of the various colors your tiles will have. Here is an example.

Then assign this material to your roof tiles, add a UVW modifier and tile the material across your roof tiles so that the individual colored tiles of the bitmap match the size of the mesh roof tiles on your scene. Set up lights and render away!

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How to make a Spanish "Barrel Tile" roof

Here's another example with a little more attention to the texture.

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