I have been working on getting a roof tile texture to look good for months. I stopped trying in 3ds Max and just resorted to Photoshop. whoch has worked okay over the months, But now I want to go back and try again with Max I have given a link with my current setting in max and textures I am using, any help would be appricated.
I am using Max 7.5 for this file
Mathew, what is your issue with the roof tiling? what does not satisfy you? the example you given is pretty basic.
I want to achive a better looking tile in general. If you look at any of my house images all my roofs look very flat. I would like to get my mapping down so I can use a dispalcement map or a bump map properly, to get the desired effect.
so really, its not the tiling, its the displacement map or the text map you’r concerned with?
I think in this case, what you need is a carefully painted displacement map to represent depth of the tiles. Not just a black and white texture or the color map.
so your saying I just need to make a good Bump map?
bump map or displacement map. Generally why tiles look bad is because they look flat in texture. And since vray is filtering the textures quite a bit, and we see roofs mainly on sharp angles those tiles go blurry. With bump map you can achieve a some what good result, but you need to work with blur option in bitmap settings in max, to reduce it from 1.0 default to say 0.4 to have a more sharper bump. With displacement it doesnt matter because its real geo. I would carefully paint a displacement map based on those tiles you got, and try my luck that way.
However, Im all about practical stuff, so if neather bump, nor displacement satisfy me, i will make a basic geo for tiles. But thats not a way to go, since you can have dozen of roofs, that would be a killer.
I have some displacement maps for roof tiles that im trying to find for you now.
Will post them once i can work out where they are.
there were a couple roof tile displacement maps posted here that a search might find…
they worked ok from a distance, i’ve ended up just modeling them and using vray proxy
From one of the people at evermotion
Might help
http://www.apex.net.au/~daforce/evermotion/pigrim2evermotion.zip
and some from this forum that someone shared ages ago.
http://www.apex.net.au/~daforce/vray/rooftile\_displace.rar
May not be perfect but certainly worth a shot
its also possible with a chunk of PS work to turn your diffuse map into a displace map. Although the diffuse map is rather average to start with and quite blurry.
I agree, best to model them.
Why not model one tile and do a z-buffer render to make a displacement map?
whats faster, all modelled or displacement?
I thank you all for suggestions! Sorry for no posting earlier, I was out of the office yesterday sick!
I wanted to avoid modeling each roof, as I have to do 2 to 3 of these a day. and each roof layout is completely different, as modeling each roof would take allot of time. Sure the out come would look better, but I have to keep time and polys down to a minimum… being a 1 man render team 
I believe the best solution has already been suggested:
Model a typical square sample of the tiles you want, and then do a Top View render from a camera and output the Z Buffer.
Then you can use this as a Displacement map.
This technique was useful on the follwoing model where modelling and placing every tile “by hand” would have driven me insane.
uuuuhhhhhh. wow!! nice one dude
Amazing result there Vu … hehe even if the post is a handfull of months late 
Great stuff… works really well. And thanks for the map.
DeJaVu - that’s really cool… When do we get to see the final?
dejaVu- You win. I’ve been spending way too much time modeling my s-tile for a while now. Now why didn’t I think of outputing to the z-buffer?
Thanks for your belated solution!
Thanks guys.
Sorry 
, I know my post is a few months late. Have been too busy to go through all the Threads, so I am a few months behind.
VRay displacement rocks. We use the same technique to great effect for things like Weatherboards, Steel profiles, etc when it is close to the camera and a bump or diffuse map just wouldn’t cut it.
jujubee: I started on the job and did the initial modeling and displacement map for the tiles, but had to move onto something else so wasn’t involved in the final product. However, I’ll ask my colleague to post it, but he’s a bit of a shy guy…not like me
:roll: hehehehe
nice one vu