Model or Texture?
 

Hi, I am trying to make a tiled roof and I am wondering if anyone knows of a way to do a reasonable job by texturing rather than modelling?

I really, really do not want to have to model a billion roof tiles if I can avoid it, as my (ostensibly quite high-end) computer is very sensitive to processing large amounts of data.

I think I already know what the answer to this is going to be . . . so any suggestions would be very welcome!

Hey rick. I take it you have photoshop.

You could lay out the uvs, then take a snapshot, put bring it into to photoshop and paint the textures.

However, depends how detailed you were going. Obviously, the light wont bounce off it realistically, so its your call. Personally, id rather model, 1 tile, and duplicate it a thousand times, but it depends on what your using it for.


Animation and still images are a different kettle of fish. If you doing it for a still image, and want detail,...model the tiles. If its for a flick and ur not bothered about detail and lighting, teture.

Either way, if u model it, u should texture it anyways.

good luck

I wouldent, not at all.

I'd use a bump map with a layered shader for the cement and the tiles so there are different material properties for each, your just using geometry for no real reason.

Depending on the level of realism, you can use a Grid texture in the procedural textures library, you can also use this as a bump and spec map.

yea just like gster said, a simple bumpmap will do the trick. Actually, renderman has a tutorial where they show the quality of their bump maps and its basically showing how to make roof tiles via bumpmap. Its good because now ur computer can run faster and get the same quality.

Well that's a lot better than I thought it was going to be, I was expecting everyone to say "you must model!" So now I go with confidence into working out how to do decent looking tile texture.

For the look of the thing, I would prefer to model 'em but I just know my compie would die, it's nice to know that I can spare myself the frustration of multiple crashing.

Thanks for your feedback, everyone, it is nice to have some guidance from people who know more than me :)

but it depends on the look your going for. sure you can go for a bump may, but if you're gonna do that your best off doing displacement map, then you get more realistic light rays and shadows.

I see what gster is saying bout geometry, but whats a few roof tiles, when the natural looking light gives it a much more real effect.

Heres a great example,

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthre...hreadid=451732

Notice that the textures, bumps, displacments do most of the work, the modeling gives undulations that would have been very hard to do, but the cracks in the floor etc are all textures, and you've got to agree that it looks very realistic, without modeling everything.