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)

-In the Edit Spline>Spline sub-object level, I added a 1" outline to the shape so it looks like this. (See Fig. 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)

-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!



*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)












-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)










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









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















-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)





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.

-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.










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!



Here's how mine looks.








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








Hopefully this will point you in the right direction and give you a good starting point to make your Spanish Tile roof.

Have fun and happy rendering.

-=rob

any questions or comments, feel free to e-mail me at raterry@cfl.rr.com