Roofs drive me crazy

I'm pretty familiar with house building but the roof takes me a lot of time. Are there any tips?

I am okay with roofs that are straight angled box shapes, but I have often wanted the kind that comes to a point in the middle, or a rhomboid or trapezoid shape. If the house is larger than the prim allowance (10m) then even joining two shaped prims at their middle doesn't work, at least not perfectly.

Is there a way of making some prims larger? Is there a way of joining triangular shapes at the edges without leaving a v-shaped channel? Is there a foolproof and faster way of making the lean-angle work without guesswork?

ALSO, the texture is a problem on these roofs. On triangular or tapered pieces, the texture goes all over the place and doesn't look natural at all. HELP

(PS, all of this is not helped by the fact that prims have a mind of their own these days, and add or subtract my maths seemingly at random.)

With practice, you can assemble most roof shapes from multiple prims. Careful alignment and positioning of texture repeats, along with the use of planar textures, can allow you to get nearly seamless textures across several prims. Two pieces can be positioned at an angle, slightly overlapping, to eliminate the "V" at the ridgeline. In some other places, you may have to add another thin, rod-shaped prim to cover seams. Or just live with something that is 'close', but not perfect.

IM me some time in world, and I'll be happy to show you some tricks for making complex roof forms.

What you might try doing is using a long prim in the triangle shape to cover the seam. I always find that the easiest way to cover the not-perfect joining of prims at unusual angles is to add an "architectural feature" that covers the joints (columns, beams, etc...) Yes, this adds prims, but it saves you hours of trying to get the alignment perfect.

Hey there neighbor! I'm having the exact same problem
at the same time, (your house is coming along pretty
well, btw)

I'm wondering if anyone knows of any good general purpose
*SL* tools for dealing with this (example 1: adding a dormer
perpendicular to main roof)

Or.. what's the math for determining, say, the intersecting
triangles of sections with a 33 degree pitch (or 45, etc)?

Hi Bucky and thanks for your help. The example you sent me is excellent.

I have done a few houses with dormers, and the way I finished up doing them was with a hollowed box prim, with path cut at the back, and some tapering and top shearing. The only problem I had was the amount of dormer roof that ended up in the loft-space, but if you have ceilings it doesn't matter.

The only advantage with one hollowed prim is that you save prims. But your solution using path-cut triangles looked more elegant and neater )

Bonny

Bonny,
Try taking a cube and hollowing it out. then put 2 45 degree twists in it. You will find the cube stretches on the points instead of the sides. The right cuts in the cube will give you a roof that overhangs a 10m width room. Add a little salt and pepper to taste....

That's a great tip for the simple case.

Where it gets interesting is intersecting, say, a 45 degree
dormer with a 45 degree main roof. Actually, that part from
the outside is easy. Getting it the cuts right from the inside
is hard.

I've been able to make a lot of progress with path cuts (always
keeping begin and end separate by .5), but am looking for more
of a formula.

Does anyone teach a roof building class?

(roofs drive me crazy too -- Bucky)

A roof? Is it raining in your sim? Too hot, too cold? Afraid someone's gonna steal your stuff? Start living outside the box - literally.

You can set the texture mapping to "planar" instead of "normal". It prevents your roof texture from being distorted towards the tip of a tapered prim. The texture image will be cut off at the edges instead, without raching to the prim borders.

Ahh roofs are a pain!

i'll be happy to give a lesson about roofs if anyone interested

i've done quiet a few styles before , i think no house sohuld have a simple roof

i know it's not a perfect way to do it but download yourself a free 3d program like blender. make up a basic box the size of your house and then using blender screw around with positioning shaping and sizing in that till you have it looking good. then log into the sl make all the peices you'll need to construct the roof and then yusing yuor angles and position information from blender use the object tab of the build menu and put it all togeer like that. you may need to adjust some bits slightly but i found it worked well for me.