Roof

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I spend ages looking for the way to create a thatched roof. I knew that I want to use planes witch an alpha texture to create a few segments which I can assembly and merge together to get a roof. This is the same method which I used to create hair for my characters. I know that the final result looks quite realistic and this is the easy way to achieve a roof which does not look flat, because I can bend each plane individually and give it some depth. It also helps to save some texture space, because I can unwrap 3 smaller planes instead of having one which has to be very big on the Uv map. The problem for me wasn't the method I will use, but the way to create the hay texture itself. I found some tutorials saying to use a Substance Designer, but I still don't feel too confident using the nodes in Substance. In this case, I started to look for a photo texture of the hay. The problem was that the photo texture was looking too sharp comparing to the other textures. It didn't work well, so I had to come up with something different.





I found another tutorial saying to model each straw individually in 3Ds Max, export it to Substance Designer to add the colours and bake to texture to create the cards. As I mentioned above, I'm not the best in Designer; however, I tested this method, but instead of using Designer, I created a simple gradient in 3Ds Max. The result was ok, but it still wasn't looking how I wanted, and it took a lot of time to model each straw.



















The last tutorial I found was showing how to use the fur and hair modifier to create the straws quickly (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5t0tUDD9e0E). I was able to generate the clump of straws than use renders to texture method to get alpha and normal maps. I created 3 cards in different sizes. For each card, I used FFD 4x4x4 modifier to bend it and deform.






















I think that the overall result is good, the texture of the roof matches the rest of the model well.













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