Building Roofs

I've built a number of houses and find myself spending more time on creating a realistic looking roof line then anything else. The roof consisting of two opposing slanted surfaces is obviously no great challenge, but getting multiple slanted surfaces to match is a back-breaking, tedious job. I'm never totally satisfied with how the seams and textures match.

For a brief moment I thought sculpty roofs were the answer, but when textured with tiles or shingles they look aweful.

I's really appreciate advice on the subject. If there are threads dealing with the subject, I couldn't find them.

If the concern is joining multiple textured prims while slanted try building the entire section flat then linking and rotating the entire set to the required angle.

This also works for aligning things when you want a build to be angled. Build aligned N-S E-W select it all and rotate.

OK - enhancement request: the ability to set build and snap grids at custom angles. Wouldn't it be a lot nicer if everything didn't line up all neat and square?

Reim

1: Planar textures are your salvation. Only way to get all the textures to line up and be the same scale.

2: Start with a roof panel that is thin on either X or Y axis. For example, make a 10m X, 0.1 M Y, 10 M Z panel. You can now use taper and skew to make right triangles and isocolese triangles and various rhomboids out of this master panel.

Go to the "RUCE 2" sim and take a good look at how the roofs of Winants Hall and Old Queens are built. Both are good examples of this type of roof construction, used for complex rooflines. Winants is the building in the SW corner of the sim, and Old Queens is the one at the North center edge, with the bell tower.

Thank you from the bottom of my little noob-heart. That's great advice from both of you! I remember playing with the default/planar setting in my early years and concluding it was of little value. How wrong! It IS the salvation.

Oh, and if you do go to the RUCE 2 sim, make sure to go *inside the attic* of Old Queens. The access stairs are at the West end of the building, at the top of the West stairwell.

It's an absolutely silly waste of prims and detailing, since most visitors to the sim will never go up into that attic space, but it was a feature the client requested specificly.

ugh, I would loveeeeeeeeee that. so many times building i swore just because of that reason

EDIT: and the one thing i learned because of that, instead of spending hours building the easy parts of the build, start with the hard parts first

A trick I sometimes do with roofs that are angled with a rectangular piece in the center and triangle pieces on the ends is to make the center rectangular piece path cut B=.375 and E=.875. The thickness needs to be twice the normal thickness, and then, if you do it right, the pathcuts are exposed and provide two faces for the roof texture instead of one. This allows you to align the textures from the center of the rectangular piece going outwards to the triangle pieces giving a uniform repeat all the way to the corners. The textures on the other sides that meet up at the corners are then flipped. If the repeats are right, and it may take a little bit of math, you end up with a nicely textured roof all the way around.

And, yes, angled roofs can be hard!

You can do this by setting a prim at the size and angle you like, then go to Tools, Use Selection For Grid.

For instance, if you set a prim for your first roof piece, you can then use that prim as your grid to align future pieces to it.

WOOOOOOO! That is exactly what I was after and was there all the time. I really need to check out those menu options some more!

Thank you!

Rime

You're welcome.

I use that a lot. I took a class on the subject about a year ago and it has come in handy every day since.