It’s hard to get panels to butt together nicely. It would be sweet if it would distort each panel(proxy) using the surface normals; much like Paracloud GEM, or other paneling apps.
I’ve wanted to script something like this;create a reference of a given panel with an FFD Box mod. align each corner of the FFD to each corner of each quad of an EPoly. then use the vertex normal to deform the FFD.
Revit 2010
Revit 2010 has something that might help. The cover of the new CD shows a glass roof structure and I saw a demo of how they did it.
vray scatter? for a glass roof?
You could not make construction docs from it:p
Ack! Not Revit! Anything but Revit! But yes, Revit seems to have some nice panelling tools…
Paracloud GEM is the pretty simple to use; a better design tool for panel structures I think. But Revit has the obvious advantage of BIM and all that construction doc capabilities… the difference between art and science I suppose.
This guy has some good tips on this sort of paneling stuff, but it’s for Revit:
This other blog has a couple of different programs, there might be a tutorial for doing paneling in Max:
looks like something that could have been poly modeled easily though
sure, I could model it. It would take forever and I would be stuck with a single design. It would be pretty hard to make the design process this dynamic and fast. Vray Scatter makes it easy to explore ten different overall roof forms quickly, with lots of detail.
The underlying geometry is a simple epoly subD with 9 verts. I can quickly deform that shape and all of the glass panels scale and reposition accordingly.
um. I stand corrected. The Surface Deform world space mod. does exactly what i’m looking for and does it much better (though less efficiently RAM wise) than VRay Scatter.
Do you have this working in max or it just a wish?
Funny you brought this up as I’ve been developing a plugin to do this kind of paneling distribution.
Surface Deform is great;
but not very precise 
Here’s a couple more examples… note the ‘precise’ alignment of panel edges allowing for precision placement over a freeform surface. If you model the panels accurately, the resultant mesh can be welded and mesh-smoothed to produce interesting results. 
In this example a simple glass and frame geometry has been conformed, using my plugin, to a 30x10 resolution plane which has a bend and wave modifier added to provide curvature.
My aim is to have a plugin that allows you to apply a collection of panels to a surface distributed by mat-ID, map or randomly; to allow highly complex cladding/roofing designs.
/Edit… Final example added that shows a structure with edges welded to allow turbosmooth of entire structure. Highly complex multy-curved panelled cladding systems can be easily developed fairly easily with this
That looks great Patrick. You could use that for all sorts of things, modular facades conformed to block models for context buildings etc.
Muoto, you’re a lucky man if you get to deal with accuracy, I get to deal with Architects though! Got to leave something for the engineering consultants to do
héhé…yeah i know…i am an architect
But i try to get as precise as i can be, its not easy to trust engineers
That is really cool! When are you planning on releasing it? 
Thanks! I don’t have a release date yet as it’s not production-ready.
If you’ve got any suggestions or requests, I’ll be sure to consider them!
At the moment, the functionality is as follows:-
My aim is to get all this working for release 1, then work on adding distribution by texturemap for the next release.
looking promising Jonah, I looked into Paracloud myself for some personal projects. It’s incredibly powerful - there are other nice procedural modelling apps that do this kind of thing, but you’ve got to be a real maths wizard to work them out if i recall!
How are you finidng Paracloud? I think I should look back into it…
Re:Form,
Sweet! You beat me to it. I still have about two to three years of developing my programming skills before I could attempt it anyway. this exactly what I’ve been looking for for years. Looks like you have some great features. Paracloud GEM is able to map to triangles. That app has become pretty hot (and expensive) since version one. Our office is transitioning to revit. So we have 2010, but I would rather keep it all in Max.
One cool feature would be to mix panel types in the same distribution. Either in a selected order or a relative orientation so you could build patterns of pannels and then distribute them.
How does it perform with hundreds or thousands of panels?
Thanks for your encouragement!
Well I already have that feature working Distribution of multiple “children” on the mesh, either by mapping the material ID to child ID, random, or cycling through the children. I aim to add some kind of material mapping mode so you can use a greyscale map to define the panel distribution.
The code is not the fastest I’m afraid. I’ve done my best to optimise it, but for 100,000s of panels, I have a feeling I’ll encounter memory problems.
My aim is to release version 1 and if there’s enough interest I’ll look into developing a faster version in c++.
