Barrel Tile Tutorial

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Software: 3DStudio MAX / Photoshop

This tutorial is designed to let you make the decision of just how detailed you want (or need) yourroof 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 ofroof.

Step 1. Create tile shape.

d 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 namethe 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)

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How to make a Spanish "Barrel Tile" roof

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.

Note: I set my grid spacing to 1" so I coul

Figure 02


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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 andentered 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 andyou 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 defaultwhich is 6. Multiply those numbers by 2 or 3 thou and you can see how this could get out of

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control.. See image below for different step interpolations.

we're going to start chopping this thing apart.

graphics cards, you could skip the next few steps but you probably don't so optimizing here will

be well worth the effort.

Now we need to ask ourselves just how close you're really going to ever get to this roof because

If you have a Quad motherboard with 4 Pentium5 6.8Ghz processors and the Mack Daddy of all

Step 4. Optimize

need it soon enough, be sure you copy and don't instance!

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

Figure 03

Go back through the modifier stack to the arc and set the Steps to 3 in the Interpolation dropdown.


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*The first course-or horizontal row-of our tile is going to be a tad higher rez than the additionalcourses 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. SelectALL 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)

Step 5. The 2nd Course

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

Step 4. We'll have 60% less faces to process on these 2 tiles together than we would have had on

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Figure 4

-go ahead and unhide the clone you made of your tile before you deleted the faces. Move the 2nd

and reduce the arc steps to further reduce poly count. Change Step count of arc to 2. Then repeat

just the one default extruded arc. It all helps trust me. (See figure 5)

figure 5


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tile to the rear and bottom extent of the 2nd tile. (See Figure 6)

Step 6. Rotate 2nd Tile


-Open the Hierarchy tab and select Affect Pivot only and proceed to align the pivot point of the 2nd

Figure 6

-Rotate 2nd tile just enough to create a ridge between to two tiles. Don't over-rotate so that there is agap. (See Figure 7)

Step 7. DuplicateYou'll need to know roughly how big your roof needs to be in order to know just how much

Figure 7

duplication you'll need to do. For instance in this tutorial we're going to build a four-sided peak roofto fit a 20'x20' building. (See Figure 8) (We'll save conical shaped roofs for another tutorial.)

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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 upabout 9" of space width-wise. On a 20' roof we'll need approximately 24 vertical runs of tileaccounting for the corner tiles and our existing vertical run. 9" tiles x 24 = 216" or 18' leavingapproximately 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

Horizontal Copies


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. Wealready 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 sometimewe'll want to roof to overhang a half a foot, etc. and we're going to chop off excess anyway so just

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.

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

-Hopefully your scene looks something like this:dialog box. This will give you a total now of 25 vertical runs running horizontally.

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other tiles in scene.

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

Step 8. Getting the right Roof Plane Shape

modifier for this one.

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Figure 10

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

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)

-Since our roof has a pitch, we need to shape our roof tiles accordingly. We'll be using the Slice

Add a slice modifier to your tile mesh and select Slice Plane to activate the Slice Gizmo. rotate thegizmo 50 degrees and move it so that you would be slicing the mesh from the lower right handcorner to the top and middle of the mesh. Check the Remove Bottom radio button to clear all themesh 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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Step 9. Making the Corner Tiles

Step 10. Align Corner Tiles and Set the Pitch.

13)


Figure 12

To make the corner tiles we're going to make a tube from the standard primitives. the tube shouldhave an outside radius of 5", an inside radius of 4" and the length should be 18". Give it 10 sides andput 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 andend at the top of our roof. It should look something like Figure 12.

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

Figure 13

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Figure 14

Next set the pivot point of the roof tile to the very bottom edge and in the middle and rotate the roof30 degrees to set the pitch. Do the same for the corner tiles and then rotate locally to align cornertiles 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.

world and the pivot point to Transform Coordinate Center so that the pivot point will be at the topand middle of our selected objects.. see Fig 15.

In the top Viewport, select both the corner tiles and the roof. Set the reference coordinate system to

the corner tiles.

should still be manageable.

Figure 15

Rotate objects 90 degrees and enter 3 in the Total Number of copies in the Clone Dialog box tocreate the other 3 sides of your roof. So it looks like this. I deleted the extra vertices on the top of

Our roof has only 25336 faces. Of course with more complicated roofs the count will grow but it

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have. Here is an example.


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 materialin the material editor and assign it to the corner pieces. If your tiles should all be the same color youcould do the same for them but if they are multi-colored tiles you can make a bitmap in Photoshopabout 10 tiles wide by 5 tiles high with each tile representing one of the various colors your tiles will

Then assign this material to your roof tiles, add a UVW modifier and tile the material across your

your scene. Set up lights and render away!roof tiles so that the individual colored tiles of the bitmap match the size of the mesh roof tiles on

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

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Barrel Tile Tutorial

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