I know, it says ‘modelling’ in the title and yes…there is some modelling required. I love modelling though, and this was a small amount to do, relatively speaking.
Smaller anyway than the alternative, which would be to make loads of specific bump maps which didn’t turn out good anyway, so wahey, all for the good.
Anyhow, my solution was to physically model the tiles themselves – which isn’t nearly so daunting as it sounds. This I felt would be far more likely to yield good results and be physically accurate, as VRay would have actual geometry to play with in this respect.
So, here we go!
The checkerboard selection method in practice
The process was very simple – all I needed were some inset tiles – I tried to stick to a four poly tile rule. They had to be either 1 or 4 if I wanted nice square tiles, and 1 would be far too small. 9 poly tiles would be absolutely massive too, so that wasn’t an option really. I started by selecting the faces in a checker board manner, then insetting them by a few mm (around 5 – I’ll be honest, I really can’t remember the exact numbers and can’t find out now).
The checkerboard selection pattern is a really useful trick for operations like insetting and extruding, as it allows you to only have to do (generally) two sets of selections and yet get all the insets/extrusions/etc you need, whilst having the areas not interfere with each other.
Demonstrated on a different roof, sorry. Same method though.
I then selected just the soon-to-be-grooves areas as shown above, then extruded them inwards by Local Normals by a few mm to create a nice tile effect.
Huzzah! Nice tiles, and super quickly.
One thing to note – as these had been UVed already obviously, I had to apply another Edit Poly modifier to the stack before making these changes – otherwise it would effectively reset my UVs. I found this out the hard way, though luckily, on one roof that didn’t take too long to remap.
The basic arch roof in tiled form
…as well as the mid-dome frames – showing off the new very basic frames material too. One of the more time-consuming tiled roofs to create.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any saved test renders of the resultant effect – you’ll just have to trust me that it was, honestly, loads better than the bump method.
Besides, in the final renders you can see the effect so all’s good 🙂
Now with the roof materials effectively sorted out, the next post I’ll deal with something a little different: the lotus[-free 😦 ] pools!
Stuart McInnes 