Modeling exterior lap siding

[philvanderloo]

I could use a little guidance on a good procedure for illustrating lap siding on a residential exterior rendering.

I'll be illustrating a full house view from a corner angle and would like to catch the shadows on the laps for as much realism as possible.

Thank You

I should add I'm using max 2016 and VRay 3.20.03

Edited August 2, 2015 by philvanderloo
Adding max version

[Nicolai Bongard]

Do you have access to railclone? If so i would recommend that. If not, just draw a spline of the side/end/profile of one board, extrude it to make it a mesh/solid object, set the pivot point to the bottomn of the object, turn on vertex snap, drag and copy/instance (whatever works best for you) as many as you need to cover a wall, then edit poly to cut and delete where the windows/other openings are. Repeat for the other walls.

[retrostarskywalker]

Check out floor generator https://cg-source.com/floorgenerator.php. They also do a multitexture thing too which could be useful. Having said that, I have not tried specifically making lap siding with it, but there are lots of options so it might be possible.

 

If that's not an option then I would:

 

--Model 1 lap board well

--Make a material using a good hi res seamless wood texture and apply it

--Then manually or using array make a tons of 'references' of that same board to make your facade.

--Because they are all references now you can use this script to instantly randomise all the texture positions so they are all difference bits of wood.http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/random-uvw-gizmotm

 

 

If the render shot is from further away though or your short on time you should be able to skip modelling the boards and get away with a good texture and bump map.

[heni30]

You can draw wall profile spline then use Sweep modifier to wrap it around your building.

 

Then collapse it to editable mesh and cut the openings into it.

[armilla]

I use the Floor Generator script to get the basic planks/strips, which have all the mapping in place and work well with Multitexture. Once I have the planks/strips, I rotate each row in one hit by a few degrees in their local X axis and then pull up the top vertices of each row by about 10mm to get the overlap. Each wall of planks can then be rotated up to a vertical position and moved into place. Hopefully that makes sense. It's a pretty quick way of doing it.

 

I keep hoping someone will tweak the Floor Generator script to work on vertical faces - my maxscript skills are non-existent unfortunately. A re-write or version 2 has been rumoured for ages now......