Ridge Cap

[glorybound]

There must be an easier way! I have been trying all morning to find an easy way to put ridge caps on an asphalt shingles roof. I know there is, because of the displacement roof script, which doesn't work anymore, automates it.

[Companioncube]

do you have railclone?

[glorybound]

Yes, but I was hoping for a displacement solution. I have 6 houses that are done, using displacement, and now they want ridge caps. The roof displacements script did a great job, but that stopped working as far back as MAX2016

[rusteberg]

you could look into Atiles using a custom shingle mesh: http://www.avizstudio.com/tools/atiles/

[glorybound]

I did download that. Not very intuitive.

[glorybound]

I did download that. Not very intuitive.

[glorybound]

If I use Railclone or Atiles I would have to model the roofs over and there are a couple dozen of them. Combining the two methods wouldn't match.

[OPEN_RANGE]

Not sure if this is of value. I often clone/copy and detach a segment of the roof shape at ridge or hip. Or even just create new spline maybe with 3D snap. Then I sweep a shape along that with generate mapping coordinates on. Make a sepetate material and apply. Can also apply displacement. Often once one is complete it can be easer to copy, rotate, mirror for other hip and ridge caps. Move, adjust position of end vertex of the spline to fine tune.

hope that may be of help.

[glorybound]

I didn't think about a sweep. I tried inset, but that got messy. Getting the correct angle is tricky.

[Franx]

What I usually do is to detach the upper polygons from the roof geometry, select the edges that I want to make ridges from, use the extrude command with 0 height and 6 or 8 inch base witdth, remove unwanted polygons and displace about a half inch more than the roof displacement value. It's the mapping that's a bit of a pain, especially if you have a lot of different angles.

[glorybound]

Yes, a lot of different angles on a lot of roofs. I might get a copy of MAX 2014 just for the displacement roof script, which again automates this.

[Deflaminis]

iToo just put up a new tutorial on roofs that includes this ridge cap. https://www.itoosoft.com/tutorials/c...with-railclone

Not sure if you'd seen it or not.

[FLP]

Creating geo for roofing, siding ect is overkill, displacement is a much better workflow. Most of the time you can get away with no displacement as the ridge is not very prominent. If you have the patterns in the right orientation and rounded peaks it's enough to fool the eye.

I am doing base modeling in Sketchup so it's super easy to UV the polys on a ridge cap.
Pro Tip: I use Joint push pull plugin to extrude the polys.

[Vizioen]

Once you create a roof with Railclone, you can keep using it over and over. So nothing overkill and instant good results. I've created one 3 years ago and except for the material and a few parameters I don't have to change anything anymore. Super fast to set up.

[glorybound]

I agree. For this client, he didn't like how the roof looked when I used RailClone, so I went to displacement. The first several projects he didn't say anything about the ridge caps, however, each project he gets pickier. Actually, although he sends me about 30 houses a year and we negotiated a really low price, he has become really picky and keeps adding an insane amount of details. It is funny how that happens