Installation and Asset Browser

Download the two files ‘Roof & Tile [Variant] [Version]_bundle.blend’ and blender_assets.cats.txt. DO NOT COPY them into your defined assets folder. The video below will show you how your acquired assets will be added, actually merged with your personal library. In the end this is represented in your blender_assets.cats.txt inside your assets folder. Both variants of 'Roof & Tile' come with the same blender_assets.cats.txt. For the basic variant some asset categories will be empty.

The blend file

Color Coding in the Outliner

In the Outliner you will see the collections color coded. Tile sets are red, ‘Roof Primitives’ are yellow, ‘Special Roof’ are purple and so on. Within a tile set, there is a separation of High Quality (HQ) tiles (green) and Low Resolution (LR) ones (blue), as well as specific (orange) and general edge tiles (purple). The ‘Roof Primitives’ are coded yellow, ‘Special Roofs’ dark purple, ‘Roof Accessories’ in purple and ‘Dormer Collections’ in bright blue. Camera and ‘Sample Roofs’ are in white.

Naming Convention

Important to notice is that all the main tiles (not ridge or hip tiles) have a dimension of millimeters in their name. Thus a ‘Beaver Tail Coat of Arms 180x380 LR’ is 180mm wide and 380mm long. LR stands for ‘Low Resolution’ and HQ for 'High Quality'.

The Geometry Node ‘GN Roof & Tile’

This is the essential Geometry Node to drive the tiling of your roof. The tiling is not fully automated as one might hope. But instead, it is a compromise between automation and control. Before we present the features, let has have a look at the general approach of this setup. This video will give you a first idea as well as some useful settings:

The Grid and Planes

Tiles are usually of the same size and are placed on the roof in form of a grid. This is the basic concept of this Geometry Node. It will create a grid where the distances of the vertices are taken from the size of the tile in use. This grid then is instanced on all the roof’s faces in the direction of the face normals. In the next step these grids (for each face) will have to be made real (Realize Geometry Node) for the Proximity Node (Targets are all the faces of the roof) to take effect. Only vertices of the grid within the roof’s faces will be used to instance the tile(s) for covering the planes.

The Edges

This Geometry Node will recognize the following conditions for your roof’s edges: Those which only have one adjacent face will not be considered to have edge tiles. Those with two faces and an angle of more than 180° will be considered as an edge. And of those where the edge’s vertices are horizontal will be seen as a ridge, the others as a hip.

The Top Level Controls

There are many settings inside this geometry node tree. The most important settings are accessible in the modifier stack. This video will explain their purposes.

The Structure of the Node Tree

In the next video we will walk you through the structure of the node tree. We have deliberately refrained from using groups or even nested groups. The better you understand the way it is built, the easier it will be for you to expand on it.

The Design ID's

Design ID's emerged from the necessity to be able to use two tiles to cover the roof. The Arab tile, also known as monk and non, consist of a top and bottom tile. Both layers need to move 'in sync' when changing the horizontal distance. The solution was in a selection scheme for the grid: 'Every other column'. From there the others evolved: every other row, a single row, a single coulumn and so on. There is more of it in this video:

Limitations and Considerations

The 'GN Roof & Tyle' only supports planar faces. Also, it does not support L or T shaped gables. Those would have to be combined from straight gables. And also important is the fact that all ridges and all hips are treated the same way. In particular the density of tiles can be odd looking if the the ridges or hips vary in length too much.

The Cone Roofs

While most roofs are made up of planar trapezoids, other more organic shapes require a different approach. The two cone roofs included have their own geometry node and their own specific form of tiling. One has a circular tiling which also allows for some design possibilities per row. The other cone is tiled similar to sun flower seeds, or mathematically known as a fibonacci spiral. The patterns for both of these are created in a plane above the cone and then the raycast node will project them unto the cones. Those projected points are used for the tiles to be instanced on. Therefore the geometry nodes have controls for the circular or fibonacci geometry as well as for the cone. The video below will give you a demonstration.

Slate

This roofing material is special, as every tile is slightly different in shape. Therefore the geometry node 'Roof & Tile - Slate' does not reference a single tile but a collection of currently 10 different ones. They are spread randomly across the roof planes. Also, slate tiles not only overlap in the Y direction but also in X. Therefore the randomisation on the Y angle is omitted. The other change, that you will find inside this geometry node is the angle value for the Z-axis. It does not rotate the single tile but the whole plane. This a typical way of tiling with slate, particular of the kind 'Slate universal'. As with the main tile, the ridge and hip tiles are also bundled inside collections. But you might be forced to change the angles among these if your roof geometry does not match.

The edges for a slate roof also use collections instead of a single tile. This makes there creation somewhat more complex, and more manual adjustment is required here. There is no automated placement as in the standard 'Roof & Tile' geometry node. But at least there is a small GN to set it's length: 'GN Roof & Tile - Slate Edges'.

Other Geometry Node Trees

All in all there are 8 geometry node trees inside the 'Roof & Tile' asset browser:

1. GN Roof & Tile : This is the standard one for planar roofs
2. GN Roof & Tile - Circular on Cone: Specific for cone roof with circular tiling
3. GN Roof & Tile - Fibonacci on Cone: Specific for cone roof with Fibonacci spirals
4. GN Roof & Tile - Demo Design ID 3: A variation on the first, just to show how you can combine designs
5. GN Roof & Tile - Slate: This is specific to 'Slate universal' tile shapes. 
6. GN Roof & Tile - Slate Edges: This is for building roof edges with slate.
7. GN Roof & Tile - Fence: This is to set up snow fences. The elements are in a collection.
8. GN Roof & Tile - Gutter: Similar to above for gutters. Here also the elements are inside a collection.

Dormer Collections

Included are a small set of dormer collections. These are known as bat or as pike dormers. They are offered in two types of tiling: Double Pan Tile and Beaver Tail Halfround.

At this point there is no dynamic or automated way to create these. It is in view for future releases of 'Roof & Tile'. On some you will find the dormer to consist of 3 parts: The tiles, the sheet and the front. The sheet is the geometry that the tiles have been placed on. It is also the boolean for the front. This should make it easier to customize the front section with windows ect. The way to use them, is to let them push through the roof plane from below.

Roof Accessories

No roof consists only of tiles. As a starting point we have included a section of accessories. Some, like the snow fence and the gutter have their own geometry node to adjust length and to have control over repeating elements.

While most of these can be placed easily on top or next to the roof, the situation with windows is more tricky. Although these windows come with a boolean block, it is not advised to apply the boolean on the realized tiles. Too often the results can be frustrating. But, because you have placed single tiles, they can be selected individually in the edit mode of your final roof and then removed. Mark any vertix and hit CTRL-L. And of course you can also place half tiles where ever you need them.

Materials

All the objects come with some kind of procedural material. But it is really up to you to design it as you need it. The only image we have used, is in the 'Environment Texture' of the world. An HDRI from Polyhaven.com .

Render

Placing individual tiles on a roof, and tens of thousands of them, certainly raises the question if they would render. Here are some experiences we can share with you. Our 'Roof Primitive' cathedral we have tiled with the rather small tile of Beaver Tail Halfround. The roof is 80 meters long, 40 meters wide and 20 meters high. This will create over 140 thousand tiles.

Switching from unrealized to realized geometry will drastically change the statistics of your object's vertices, edges and faces from the 10's of thousand to 10's of millions. If Blender does not crash at this point, you have a good chance that it will also render your image in detail. Here is a render from a different perspective: It is a 4k render which was done a little over 40 seconds. The peak memory usage was at around 3GB of VRAM. This is of course only a rough indication on how well it could work for you. But we feel, that one should not be intimidated on tiling large roofs. Of course, the geometry of the tile should be as simple as possible and the material used should not involve any displacement. 

Using 'Roof & Tile'

In the next video we will show you how to use 'Roof & Tile'. Starting with an empty blend file, you can have your roof tiled within 5 minutes, including edge, ridge and hip tiles.