Flat seam copper shingles

Evening

Tiles.skp (194.7 KB)

I think I might be being stupid here … but, I cant for the life of me work out how to draw overlapping staggered shingles.

I understand the principal …

Shingles%2001
images

and I’ve drawn a shingle

Which I can work out how to draw the vertical lap (apart from the corners ??)

But when I try to do the diagonal lap i get horrible gaps and incorrect intersections.

What on earth am I doing wrong - completely confused and been trying to do this simple thing for hours !

I’m not sure I see the problem (I’m on public trans right now on my tablet, can’t download the .skp), but I trust there is one! What strikes me is:

Why are you even trying to model to this level of detail?

Unless I had a specific reason to model a roof such as this including small details, I’d just find a picture that I could make a texture and apply it to the flat plane of the roof. Or, if you have batten boards, create a minimal thickness (non-zero to avoid z-fighting) plane outside of the batten boards solely to apply the texture. Once you pull back even 3-5 feet, it should be virtually indistinguishable from actually modeling the details.

In fact, I do intend to model something similar - the metal roof of the tiny house on wheels that is slowly coming together. It never occured to me to use anything other than a texture as I’ve described. Given the small size of my roof, it should be quick and easy to do any necessary takeoffs by hand.

Part of it may be that, while it may look very, regular straight and orderly, it all depends on a little bit of flex and deformation to work. That’s hard (though, I suppose, not impossible) to model in SketchUp.

Hi @Gemma_Baird,

I’m with @sjdorst on this one.

It’s hard to imagine a case where it would be advantageous to model the individual roofing tiles rather than using an imported texture to illustrate the roof finish. It’s much quicker and it results in a more efficient model size.

Are you attempting to model a roofing detail similar to something illustrated below for use in a set of ConDocs?
imageimageimageimageimage

If so, this can be done with a detail model that shows only a portion of the building and this would be referenced to a LayOut file. For this type of detail, the tiles need not be shown
as they would actually be constructed because they will be seen in section view only.

As the others have said, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to model an entire roof with individual tiles like this. If you must do so however, you’ll find it easier if you draw the tile correctly.

As @RTCool mentioned, the real tiles of this sort require a bit of flex to make them lay correctly. This would be difficult to make happen in SketchUp but you could set up the component axes so that the components will lay close to correctly

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TileDiagram.skp (122.5 KB)
Quick and dirty diagram with exaggerated scales. Each side represents parallelograms rather than rectangles. But two of the edges require bends to accommodate the overlap owing to the offset nature of the tiles in the next aisle (that is, each row of tile being offset halfway from the previous row).

This is the easiest way to illustrate that the tiles are not perfectly flat as they must accommodate other tiles.

I’d have a look at this video and take note of the hammer usage, and how the joints are knocked into place.
They use copper because it is a flexible metal and can be beaten into shape.
To model a finished roof like this would be more an organic challenge than an architectural one.

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I do understand where your coming from but unfortunately this is for a technical detail - so it will only show about 10 tiles overall and so a texture unfortunately wont fit the bill in this case but thank you.

That tile is vastly better drawn than my own - I couldn’t work out how to get those lovely curved folds that your showing there myself.

TileDiagram.skp 2 (122.5 KB)
Quick and dirty diagram with exaggerated scales. Each side represents parallelograms rather than rectangles. But two of the edges require bends to accommodate the overlap owing to the offset nature of the tiles in the next aisle (that is, each row of tile being offset halfway from the previous row).This is the easiest way to illustrate that the tiles are not perfectly flat as they must accommodate other tiles.

I’d have a look at this video and take note of the hammer usage, and how the joints are knocked into place.
They use copper because it is a flexible metal and can be beaten into shape.
To model a finished roof like this would be more an organic challenge than an architectural one.

That makes sense - I guess I haven’t been giving it the flexibility of real life situations.

Thank you everyone !

Lead is even more versatile, they have used it for ages in cathedrals and churches, but also on this boat I built some 25 years ago. I still remember the craftman-ship of the contractor who did the lead.
With lead, you wouldn’t need soldering, just knocking the seams constantly will join the parts together.

You must have had issues with X-Ray face style at that tiime, designing that boat.

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It was not my design, I was the contractor, then, but I seem to remember that the architect had a strange glow:
image

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OK. For your use case, you’re absolutely right. For a technical detail drawing, textures aren’t enough.

I drew the flat tile as in the illustration you showed and then used Radial Bend from Fredoscale to fold over the edges. I didn’t bother to research to see how thick the copper is so I just guessed.

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