I set this up so that I can ramble on about my lead (and plastic) mountain, my endless gaming, miniature, and terrain projects, and other

insights into various games.



You'll find lots of 'pretty pictures', various modeling techniques, and hopefully some inspiration for your own lead pile. You're bound to

find something amongst my games and photos that interests you.



Sit back, open a cold one, and enjoy.


If you need something, feel free to contact me at: dglennjr at yah00 dot com









Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Hip Roofs: Simpler than you might think.

Someone asked me about making hip roofs, so I sat down and sketched out how to make them as simple as I could.

For buildings with hip roofs, it's much easier if the building is rectangular, so that it has some type of Ridge. (see the diagram) You can still do a hip on a square roof, but you end up with 4 triangular pieces which are more difficult to connect and keep 'square'.


I know you don't want to hear this, but it does take some basic Algebra and geometry to figure out the dimensions to make your templates.

The Width (W), Length (L), and Height (Ht) of the roof are givens, or at least you figure out what they need to be.  The Ridge (R) length is simple enough to figure out.  The only challenge is figuring out the length of the line H1.  (It is the hypotenuse of a right triangle, drawn perpendicular to sides W and L) H1 is a line drawn perpendicular to either side of the W or the L for the end or side template.  The equation for H1 is pretty simple and can be done with a standard calculator with the square and square root functions.

For line H2, you don't even need to calculate it.  If you can accurately draw lines W, L, and H1, then you just connect the points A and B to form the line H2. (See the diagram)

**Note:  If you cut the roof panels out of anything thinker than cardstock (I.E.: Foam board and etc.), then you may want to 'chamfer' the interior surfaces so that they fit snuggly together.  

If you follow these simple rules, you'll get a pretty accurate hip roof, without all of the continual "trim to fit" that it seems a lot of you do.

See the modified hip roof of the building in the upper right of the photo. 

This Anglo-Saxon/Viking era building is a variation on the hip roof I just explained.

Happy Roof Building!

8 comments:

  1. Thanks David, could you please doe a L shaped roof aswell?

    ReplyDelete
  2. It's almost the same as you still need to find the value for H1. It's just that the templates for the roof are of a different shape. I'll see what I can do to add a sketch of that as well.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Very useful post. Thanks for the info!

    Steve

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thank you so much for your help with this project. if you'd like to see some photos of what I built (It's not anywhere near as good as your creations) you can check them out on my blog: http://kirkallmond.com/2013/01/31/the-oriental-hotel-and-saloon/ I mentioned you there, hopefully some folks from my blog will stop by and see the incredible work you do.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Useful information, I'll kep that stored for future reference

    ReplyDelete
  6. Nice work and very useful info. I made some roofs myself once, not an easy task.

    tom

    ReplyDelete
  7. thanks for your useful information. what if I have a gable roof combine with the main hip roof. how can I built the gable roof?

    ReplyDelete
  8. http://www.sticksite.com/house/
    This is a good site for paper houses - modern style.

    ReplyDelete