What is the best way to create aluminium shingles?

[danieltaylor]

Hello all.

 

This is only my second 3ds Max V-ray rendered model but it's an important one, as this is the final project of my architecture degree.

 

I'd like to make these aluminum shingles you see in the attached image. I have them drawn on a CAD file already and was thinking about drawing them then instancing each one to ensure i get a nice varied facade when I come to render. But this seems quite labour intensive. What if I were to create polylines for each shingle in CAD and then use the extrude modifier? Or is it as simple as creating a V-Ray material. Wit my deadline ten days away I though it best to ask for some expert advice before I risk wasting valuable time doing the wrong thing.

 

Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks, Daniel

[Tommy L]

Hello all.

 

This is only my second 3ds Max V-ray rendered model but it's an important one, as this is the final project of my architecture degree.

 

I'd like to make these aluminum shingles you see in the attached image. I have them drawn on a CAD file already and was thinking about drawing them then instancing each one to ensure i get a nice varied facade when I come to render. But this seems quite labour intensive. What if I were to create polylines for each shingle in CAD and then use the extrude modifier? Or is it as simple as creating a V-Ray material. Wit my deadline ten days away I though it best to ask for some expert advice before I risk wasting valuable time doing the wrong thing.

 

Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks, Daniel

 

If I remember the end of the 3rd year correctly, you could do without the headache of modeling the shingles. Looking at your reference image the shingles would be fairly easy to create in a field, but difficult to do where they wrap around the edges. Just render it as a material. If you ned to add dimension the use a normal map. If thats a new thing to you then use a bump map (gradient or gradient ramp rotated 45 degrees). Your design should not be marked down because of it and you will have more time to spend doing what you should be doing...designing.

Your tutors are not amateurs or laymen, they can interpret design and its the design they will be grading.

If you want to impress with your presentation then do some really nice plans/sections/elevations/ technical section. Thats what architecture tutors get off on, 3d just makes them feel old.

[danieltaylor]

Thanks for your speedy reply. I'll have a go.

 

Unfortunately at my school the tutors absolutely love 3D pretty drawings that aren't necessarily even that architectural - even though few of them can even use Sketch Up let alone anything else.

 

Cheers.

[Scott Schroeder]

http://bertrand-benoit.com/blog/2010/03/31/frank-gehry-style-titanium-scales/

 

Displacement is the way to go. Though you have to make sure your mesh you are displacing is a good quad mesh that has enough information to displace from. All too often people will try to displace a crappy SketchUp triangulated turd of geometry then wonder why it's breaking at the seams or not displacing properly.

[danieltaylor]

Nah, as green as I am to all this even I know not to mix Sketch Up and Max if I can help it.

 

So are you saying I should make my facade wall as normal, then turn it into a mesh, crank up the polygons then use a displacement modifier with an Autocad bitmap of my facade? Except i suppose I'd have to inverse the colours of the cad image so that the tiles were black and the joints were white.

 

Again, thanks for the speedy reply. This site is such a good resource.

[Scott Schroeder]

I'd follow the tutorial can create your square patch of tiles and create your displace map from that. Most of the time, the best displacement maps are the ones you make yourself.

 

As for the building, what I usually do is simple put a nice quad polygon surface over the existing face of the building (this is if I've gotten the model from the Revit guys and the surface isn't the best or I hadn't originally intended to displace the surface so I cut corners in creating the geometry). If I create the wall from scratch then I will create it with displacement in mind and try to keep it as decently square quad as I can. Then apply a turbosmooth to it so I can control how dense I want the mesh to get depending on my needs for displacement.

[Tommy L]

Unless you have some processing power Id stay away from displacement. Keep it simple. Ten days left on 3rd year? Just use a regular vray materual and a bump map rather like the one Ive attached here. Put a falloff in your reflection, drop the reflection glossiness to about .7 and make sure you have a sky of some kind for the material to reflect.

[danieltaylor]

Excellent gents. Thanks for all the advice.