Follow-up to AU class on roofs

Hey all, had a great time at AU in Las Vegas! At least one picture of me and several other folks have made it on to the AUGI website. I got to attend Scott Brown and Scott Davis' class on creating roofs. I don't usually do straight forward tips & tricks but here is a little of my own follow-up for their course.

During the class the guys showed how to create a roof using a mass element, this is handy for unique conditions, or repetitive unique condidtions, like roof crickets, or warped/sloped flat roofs. In their example they used a blend to create a more unique condition, however for my little tutorial I used some blander mass shapes to create my roofs.

I started by creating a mass object that represents the reptitive portion of my roof.

Then I created a roof by face and grouped the roof. From there the group can be arrayed.

Once the first group has been arrayed you can go back and modify the mass, and create a new roof by face. Group the new roof, then you can select your remaining groups and change the group type to match your new group.

The advantage of this methodology is that for a repetitive roof element you only have to manage one mass object, as opposed to defining multiple mass objects. You can even rotate, move and mirror the group throughout a model. You can't include the mass object in the group, as the roof by face command can't re-create the roof object, it looses its assoication. If you're not going to need your old roof object make sure to delete the group. While groups can sometimes be problomatic with large number of elements, you should not encouter too many problems with some simple roof elements. This technique should prove especially useful for any project with large repetitive roof structures.