Request modeling help :) > distribute roof tiles over an uneven roof surface

[bsfranza]

hi there together…

once every so often it happens that there is a problem i cant solve in sketchup…

this time i have an uneven roof surface where the ridge and the eaves are on the same height but one of the ridge points is moved back/forth…

in my simplified example the points ab and cd have the same height - only b got moved back along the green axies…

now to get a more subdivided organic surface i used curvyloft…

the last step would be to distribute/scatter the the roof tiles over this surface in a matter where they are dropped to the surface and then aligned with their object axies to the surface normal …

i have tried numeral “drop” plugins etc… so far smart drop is something that comes close but unfortunately this is a very unpredictive piece of code… as soon as the object that should be dropped is a component with modified axies it does noe behave as expected…

if anyone has another idea of how to accomplish the tast at hand, that would be super many many thanks guys

problem file.skp (181.1 KB)

[g.h.hubers]

Is the uneven roof surface going to be more or less rectangular in projection on the ground plane? Can you tell what the restrictions / boundaries are?

If it were to be as you show in your image on the right side, I would construct the surface from a simplified single tile (calculate the need to rotate a-b per tile). Use that simplified tile to set up the next (=copy the next and slightly rotate\snap). Then copy both to get the next two and rotate\snap, etc till you get the first row.
Make one row a parent component of all its tiles.
Copy the first row to the next one and rotate\snap according to the needed rotation per row.
Then again next one or even two rows etc. till you get all your rows.
If you calculated a-b’s rotation correctly you’ll get the correct A-B to mach the entire surface in the end.

Now you can use ‘Replace Component’ to see your surface with real tile geometry.

It all sounds difficult and cumbersome but it’s not going to be that bad.

[bsfranza]

thanks for your suggestion > i have attached a skp in my first post if you want to try your workflow…

in the meantime i have played with skatter… it also has some problems…
does anyone have an idea on why the tiles rotae when using the "normal"option?

anyways - fixing the scatter issue does not solve my initial problem

i will try now the manual method

[jiminybillybob]

I don’t think that’s possible with Skatter alone. But maybe combining Skatter and Flowify.

[bsfranza]

hi there together…

well after some playing i figured out with 2 scatter sets one can get the work done…

i would jump one row in the first set and in the second set use the offsets to archieve the tile distribution…

there are some small problems but nothing that can be fixed…

one of the problems is the orientiation of the elements when using the slope option… one needs a very fine tesseleted mesh so the “turning around z” is not as obvious as in my example

another problem is the edge bleed - i used the offset surface tools of the “tools on surface” to get a larger patch and in the end process used slicer or zorro or whatever to cut away the overhanging tiles…

here is some progress of the work im doing on this roof as well as some “test file” if anyone has interest…

solution.skp (698.4 KB)

and here part of the acutal work from which the problems arised

thanks for all inputs again,
best,
franz