Update March 25th

At the moment I am currently blocking out the roofing, which is, as expected, the most difficult part. The challenge is scaling and topology, while maintaining the traditional shape of the Chinese roof. The main difficulty is the shape. The shame is very much unlike that of western roofing where it is mainly just an angle for slates to be placed on with ease. Chinese roofing is curved, simply because when it rains the roofs curve can "Flick" the rain water away from the interior architecture where weaker, but more decorative, wood is used. This couses multiple problems for creative modular peace's for the roofing. Not only are the tiles complicated to model but so is the Bracketing under the roof where there consists of lots of wooden poles which can be clustered and add to hundreds in just one section of the environment. Instancing is the obvious answer for this, however to keep the peace's in a mathematically even separation from each other they will have to be grouped together, which in turn can, unfortunately take the demand to a higher level. separating the faces from a larger poly version of the base roofing will be required to achieve this.

The other problem is the corners where the roofing changes direction at a 90 degree angle. trying to create the geometry to go round such an aria will require it to be higher demanding than useral. At the moment I am planning on creating a hight map for the Roofing so that the geometry does not have to me created, however the hight-map will take up memory, maybe more memory. For the time being I am sticking to the smoothing edges in Maya and adding a Normal map to the top to simulate high geometry, the problem is that the character will me mostly looking up at the roofing, so I will most likely create small sections of geometry and then have the ends of the roofs higher poly and instanced along the roofing with a normal-map plane with detail placed in front of them.

Screenshots/ Renders below.

So fare after working of Roofing 1.0, I have moved onto Roofing 2.0 where I am reconstructing the geometry and splitting up sections of the model to instance, and so safe on memory.

Things to work on is overlapping poles and then applying textures to the model.