I started manually placing roof tiles and realised I was likely wasting time doing this and thought there must be another way. So I made a new save iteration and tried using Mash networks like we used in Alec’s cactus tutorial for Animated Narratives.
I was going through this video until I got to changing the mash distribution settings to mesh. It worked? but not really. The tile mesh was really small, far apart from each other and miles away from the roof mesh.
I thought maybe the tiles weren’t actually set to 0,0,0 but they were. I thought it couldn’t be the roof mesh since in the above video and this other one (below) their meshes weren’t at 0,0,0 either.
I tried setting the roof mesh I wanted back to origin anyway but the issue was still the same. I found in this forum thread that Mash doesn’t work well with projects that are set to metres in the unit settings, which is what I set my project to at the very beginning.
https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/maya-modeling/mash-mesh-distribution-not-working/td-p/8452860
I changed the unit to CM and this fixed the problem. With some further tweaking in the mash distribute settings, the tile distribution looks a lot better. I had to add in some more edge loops on the roof mesh so the tiles wouldn’t bunch up together or leave large gaps between rows. Turning on scaling in the face/edge settings also improved the look, as before all the tiles were the same size, now its scale adjusts to the size of the face on the roof mesh so it prevents really large tiles colliding with each other at the top of the roof.
Before enabling scaling:
Final tiles on the cone shaped roof
Tiles on bottom roof
Finished model before scene organisation, cleanup, UVs + sculpting
