What's the best way to map a conical roof for roofing material?

[philvanderloo]

using cylindrical mapping doesn't work so great. Hopefully someone can clue me in on how to make this roofing material look right on a round, (coned), roof.

Thank You

[Peter M. Gruhn]

I wonder why your map is stretched horizontally in some places. Maybe the mapping gizmo isn't centered on the cone.

 

Be that as it may, it doesn't matter. Because a cylinder has the same circumference (read: Number of shingles) at the top as it does at the bottom. Your conical roof does not suffer from that benefit. A hundred shingles along the bottom and two on top.

 

Be THAT as it may... I don't know how to map this. Spherical mapping solves a similar problem but it needs a distorted map. I thought for a second that real world mapping would work. Let the cone generate its own coords and let inches map to inches. But it looks like the cone just thinks it's a cylinder (... sorta).

 

I thought for a second that a triangular map would work. It didn't for reasons which are clear after the fact.

 

Thinking about it for a second, you can't map it to a regular rectangular tile because each row "slips" against the one below it. Or... the vertical seams between shingles can not line up yet they do on the texture.

 

Okay so here's what I did:

- make the cone

- adjust the height divisions and height to line up perfectly on rows of shingles

- edit poly. Edges.

- select all the horizontal rows of edges (select one. hit ring. hit loop.)

- split.

At this stage you should have one editable poly with n different elements. one for each row of shingles. If you have too many shingles you can probably get away with three rows of shingles per element.

- detach all elements to separate objects (there's a soulburn script for this. it is worth your time to go get it now)

- put a new uvw map, cylindrical, real world on each of the new elements. You HAVE TO do this one at a time to get the map to fit the size of this element. If you gang them, you just get the same result you started with (sorta).

- now all you should have to do is adjust the Z of the mapping gizmo.

 

This makes it look great from one direction. Shingle seams start to line up further away from the pretty zone. Some manual rotation (either the objects or the maps) can help mix this up.

[Peter M. Gruhn]

Here's a picture showing one rank of shingles on one object with UVW just in case somebody needs help envisioning.