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WIP: RoofTiler - A plugin for making geometrical tile roofs in max.


DaXiiD
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Hi!

First i would like to give two thumbs up for the great community. I have found help here numerous times. :)

 

I have been doing arh-viz for 5 years now , and for some time I have been developing misc tools to make our working lives a little easier.

 

After having to do a huge amount of high detailed tile roofs for complex buildings, i had it. 3dsmax has no good tools of doing this tedious task in a simple way.

 

The first tool is called RoofTiler and it is intended to do automatic roof tiling:

 

 

 

http://ivar.planet.ee/rooftiler/rooftiler_alpha_007.jpg

 

 

pilt.jpg

 

 

So what does it actually do?

You give it a roof mesh object like the one seen on the top link and choose a roof tile and push the big red button. After some calculation the entire mesh object has been tiled and the roof tiles have been cut in the right places. This is all it does for now.

 

 

What will the features be then?

*A premade procedual library of commonly used tiles

*A simple way to use custom meshes as tiles

*Occlusion objects (you can use custom meshes to cut the tiles)

*Spline extraction for ridge tiles, gutters.

* if possible, automatic ridge tiling.

* automatic uvw

*random materials for tiles (for color variance)

*simple UI

*max9-max2009 32/64bit

 

* Your features!!

 

 

Where does it fail?

*curved roofs- probably will develop something for them too. But not now

 

 

 

 

For availabilty: Not yet.

There probably will be a small open betatest in the future, but the time is still unknown. When i feel it is up to commercial standards.

 

 

I live in Estonia and some aspects of "common" may differ. So i have a question:

What tiles are most commonly used?

 

 

 

As said it is a work in progress, and i would really appreciate any feedback.

 

If you guys think it is a useful plugin for max and have ideas for features, then please comment. I would like to make this plugin as complete as i can.:)

Edited by DaXiiD
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if you could go into 'subobject' rooftile mode = ridge Tiles

and Then pick 2 points, 1 start and 1 end point and have The

 

prgoram automatically draw The ridge Tile, edge Tile

 

That would be so awesome

Lots of Tile roofs in sunny arizona

 

Thanks for your efforts

 

when This is all said & done

maybe autodesk will buy you out

 

and you can retire and do more plug-ins Full Time

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vizwhiz: Bingo, something like that i had in mind.

 

jsf: informative site, hadn't seen that before. thnx for the pointer.

 

two-piece mission clay tile with additional pieces will be included.

 

own1221: Most things were done on the fly and for in-house use. But

there are two things I plan making into a plugin.

 

The first one is for populating huge parking lots with proxy on mesh cars (it reads stripe info from cad splines or editable mesh stripes). And works on uneven surfaces. Used in in-house production, but isn't ready for a release.

 

 

The second one is a experimental wall system that uses cad drawings to generate the walls and place windows, doors. Very early stages of development.

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This and similar features are things we have discussed at another forum and wondered why someone hadn't developed. I could see a commercial project that does this and other items like siding/cladding with with options like no treatment at sides and around openings so that you could apply Trim, flashing...........

 

Very nice of you to share your work, I see this and similar features as a huge gap in the tools available for archvis and if you continue development should at least have a donation button somewhere so that anyone who finds the tools useful and would like to, could donate a little something to help the project out.

 

Thanks again!

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Just a suggestion for the custom mesh portion of your list - you could include the option of selecting the base tile geometry from within the scene with a dialog which would extract the geometry extents as a default offset dimension but allow for manual override. This would allow greater flexibility for both regional and manufacturer differences.

Curved tile roofs are a pain in the real world too so don't feel too badly about it! :)

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  • 4 weeks later...
sorry to say but weve made a plugin that does just that at Batzal software...

 

A little competition is always good for the products.

 

I'll be releasing a demo version in a few weeks. I think that i can compete with the plugin in speed and in power.

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Brian,can you please be more specific? you looked for the plugins features? thank you,your opinion is very important and helpful..

 

I got lost on the 1st description sentence. I have no idea what you are saying by...

 

Roof Designer lets the user define geometrical plane constrains on mesh faces, making all of the face's vertices reside on one plate.

 

The portfolio didn't tell me anything either. Why not have images of the program interface with some images of the result in the viewports? Maybe more complex tile roofs. Also, there's quite a bit of English wrong...grammar and structure. Just my 2 cents...but good luck with it nevertheless!

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A little competition is always good for the products.

 

I'll be releasing a demo version in a few weeks. I think that i can compete with the plugin in speed and in power.

 

definitely, a product with no competition is nothing but a wrong reading of it's market

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  • 5 months later...

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