Modeling lap siding procedures

[vanderloo]

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

[super gnu]

id just poly model it. displacement could be used but often introduces artifacts and slows your rendering down. you can make a few large "sheets" of siding, align them to the walls of the house, and go up each side pulling the verts of the boards along until they are the right length for the specific location. use multitexture or similar for the textures, and randomise uv by element script to give to some decent mapping variation.

as a "plus" youd even have to do the corners right.. extra nice detail.

time consuming but right.

of course im sure somebody will chip in now suggesting railclone or something. probably can be done in that, but ive barely used it.. always seemed to me the time spent setting up railclone to do a task isnt much quicker than just modelling it. (obviously for specific repetitive tasks im sure its great..

[glorybound]

I use a simple displacement on my work.

[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......

[glorybound]

+1 that on non-vertical support.

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......

[Syclone1]

+1 Another vote for that, Ive been using it for a number of things besides floors and other than always having to make it horizontally at first I love it!

+1 that on non-vertical support.

[super gnu]

while i find it useful, it always fails for me (messy edges with missing boards) on anything but very simple border splines. is there a trick im missing?

[piotrus3333]

sweep modifier