10 Minecraft Roof Designs! (Minecraft Build School)

Hello my name is green and welcome back to another episode of build school now well over two years ago i did a build school on roofs you may very well remember but i did a very basic overview with some very basic designs today i’ve got 10

Designs to show you with a bit more complexity involved somehow that video has 1.2 million views and i only showed like five very basic ideas so today we’re going to go over a few more but before we start i want to show you just how important rooves are to a build by

Removing some from some of my old builds this is a build that i made last year for halloween it’s probably one of the builds that i’m most proud of it’s got a slightly bigger scale than i normally build at but most importantly the roof is very very important on this one so to

Kind of get my point across on how important roofs are i’m actually going to remove this one and all the details that are surrounding it and we’ll take a look at what it looks like i have no idea either so let’s just pop this away for a second i think that’s most

Definitely proven my point this looks pretty pretty bad without a roof even if we put just like a flat surface on the top here it’s just not gonna cut it it’s not gonna cut it at all i know that this stripe was technically part of it but you get the idea

Roofs really make or break a build so let’s go back and take a look at the many different kinds that you can try and explore and find the one that works best for your build i’m gonna put this back the way it was ah better much better okay let’s move on

Shall we okay so now we know how important the roofs are let’s have a quick mosey on through so what i’ve done basically is i’ve googled the different types of house because i’m not an architect i don’t know all the terminology i just build in minecraft

And i know what looks good in minecraft so i kind of googled real life examples and learned all the names and stuff and i’ve replicated some of them in this episode of build school today but i’ve also come up with some sort of minecrafty ones that don’t really exist

In real life so there’s a bit of a crossover between reality and the game so this first one is probably a recap of the first episode i did to do with roofs this is gable and dormer so a gable is basically what i was calling an a-frame very similar

Anyway so it’s kind of this big a shape on the side of a building and it’s got a pretty nice overhang the other thing is a dormer which is this thing the roof is interrupted by a smaller triangle usually you’d sort of see this involved here where this

Triangle is sort of set back but i’ve got a very small example here i only want to give small examples for this video so that it’s much easier to kind of take on board so i’ve actually put three different techniques so to speak in this particular example maybe even a few more

So right we’ve got the gable which we know we know this a-frame and then we know the dormers because i’ve gone over these before if you don’t know basically it’s what we all do with staircase upside down staircase one block over the edge and also i’ve put a

Cobblestone outline with a spruce sort of body to this so that’s the simple bit on this side i’ve added a couple of variations where this is just a full block so instead of using staircase i’ve just added a full block and this is totally fine it is a

Cheaper way to do it if you have limited resources this is like a fourth of the cost of doing this so i would definitely recommend using full block if you are limited the only other thing is if you’ve got windows in the wall you might want to create a bit

Of shape around it and that sort of bleeds into the roof a little bit when you sort of make an outline using the cobblestone into that and you can use you know different blocks for whatever so that’s just a little recap of your standard style roof and that’s called a

Gable and dormer this is the gable dab it’s the dormer right so let’s move on to some more of the minecrafty stuff so this didn’t really have a name i was looking up the examples and stuff so this is just a flat roof and you can

Make flat roofs like if we removed all of the sandstone bit you would just see a big old block of wood and that’s fine you can decorate that in certain ways like i have here so the key behind the balustrade is by having layers now all of these

Bits are one block out they always have one block out from the wall the next thing that’s important is having a gap so on this side i’ve produced no gap and it does look okay don’t get me wrong this does sort of work but in my opinion

It works even better if you’ve got a little bit of gap so it really looks decorative and you can even accentuate this by making this gap here not wood you can make this a different color and that way you really distinguish the roof from the rest of the body of the building

You can also add little bits underneath with staircases and that’s just the overhang bit once you get up here you want to create a high enough balustrade which is kind of just like a barrier or a fence or whatever and make it so when you’re sitting on

The floor standing on the floor you can still see it so that might mean making it two maybe even three blocks tall and i’ve just done this by placing a staircase on the bottom and a staircase on the top and they just go really nicely flush and it looks really nice

But unfortunately using this technique you are limited because you can’t actually go much more than that on this side now the other thing that i want to point out is that i’m using very very small examples here so you might want to consider using this kind of build on a larger scale

Something a lot bigger than this because as you can see it really dominates and it’s not supposed to it’s just supposed to be decorative okay so that’s just the flat roof with the balustrade hopefully you took something away from that remember slabs and staircases are your friend and you can even make

Sort of more of an overhang if it’s really big so the further you go out the more noticeable it’s going to be so let’s move on and we’re going to build on this sometimes instead of having the balustrade we’re just going to have the mansard roof now that’s the technical

Term this is basically sort of your european style roof now all of these include the sort of the overhang with the detail that we normally have i.e like this and i’ve even done the same thing with the staircases i’ve even used sandstone and again you could whack in a

Different color behind this if you want to make it stand out that little bit more that also is fine but the main part here the main difference is this bit made out of gray concrete and i’ve used grey concrete because it’s the closest color to

What we see in real life with the slate and that kind of thing so the key one here is the shape goes up and over it doesn’t go directly diagonal you can see if i just draw a diagonal line this bit juts out now because i’ve built this at

Such a small scale it’s hard to get that really perfect rounded shape and the rounded shape is supposed to only go in these corners one of the key things here is to make sure you go two blocks up at a time one two one two and then you

Finish off with a further one that’s the sort of style you want to go for if you’re at a bigger scale you might want to up that to three and so on and so forth depending on how big you build your buildings so for this sort of scale you know taller bigger wider

You’d want two then two and then one at the top and then once you’ve done that you can then add in a bit of shape so if i remove the shape here it does look pretty flat and you could keep it like that but i’ve just knocked out a couple

Of these blocks instead of having the corners like that because these corners here especially at this scale it’s so obvious that there’s just the real rigid right angles there so i’ve just knocked out the blocks in the corners and that’s given it the shape that it needs and

Then you can also add in the middle of this to give it a bit of a sort of false perception of a curve i just added a couple of blocks in the middle there as well so that is the man so that is the mansard roof moving on we

Recently covered this in our style video this is called the irimoya roof now i didn’t actually know the name of this i actually googled the japanese style of roof and they’ve got their own whole different world of architecture like all of the names of their stuff is so

Complicated so i’m only going to cover this one is the irimoya one and this is the one that i kind of covered in the style video so the keys here are the very distinct outline uh putting in the fences in the corners and the main thing is that these arches go

From a slow burn and then they arch up pretty quickly so they’re very gentle gentle gentle so i’ve used slab slab slab and then to staircase which will bring it up a lot quicker so there’s sort of two halves to that one and obviously the larger you go in

Scale the more complex it’s going to have to be with working out how many slabs to staircase you’re going to need and then behind it you’re going to need to put yourself some white concrete or some other block to give it a bit of color the key here is to make sure you

Have these frameworks that go all the way around and these corners jut out a little bit i’ve obviously had to make this a little bit simplified because it is a very small build here but hopefully you can kind of get the idea now if you’re struggling with this one because

It is a particularly difficult roof to get the hang of i’d recommend googling japanese roofs and it would be a surprising and it’s surprisingly easy to copy it once you have the image in front of you okay moving on this is the same roof that i made for

The haunted mansion that we saw earlier and this is just a mansard variation that i could see so i saw both of these on sort of google images when i was looking them up but in minecraft in my opinion this one is slightly different to this one so the

Key over there was that it sort of goes up and over to the right this one sort of dips under before going up so a little bit kind of like the japanese style where it starts slower and so instead of doing the one two one two kind of style that we

Did there the two up two up two up this one starts with one one and then it goes up to two two so it’s kind of the inverse of the mansard roof we did over there and again i’m using grey concrete the other things that i’ve done so it’s

All the same style just the inversely start one one then up two two the other thing that you can do with this one is the overhang here is a bit more prominent so this is a much wider build than all the others because i wanted to show you that you can do

A slab and then another slab and then that’s where you put your details in afterwards now the reason for this is because if this was set one block closer to the wall this roof wouldn’t sit very well at all this roof needs a large footprint it needs to spread out so

This bit of block needs to sit one block over from the wall so having it just one block out or just giving it a bit of spread really helps a lot the final thing to talk about here is that i added sort of a iron fence thing on the top

Now this is purely decorative and it costs a lot of iron especially if it’s made out of cauldrons and anvils and then iron fence to top it off but it’s a really nice way to decorate the top of these kind of roofs to give them that

Extra bit of height to give it that extra bit of shape and detail so you alternate between cauldron anvil and then you put a cobblestone wall on top of the cauldrons and then iron fences on all of them and you can sort of vary that at all like this is a very similar

One to the one i did with my haunted house so go and check out that tutorial if you want to know more about this particular style moving on now it wouldn’t be much of a video if we didn’t talk about the modern style now this is just modern flat this

Was kind of on the example sheet at the start but i wanted to talk about it anyway so let’s pretend that this is a coffee shop because it kind of looks like it you have your main bit which is attached to the floor the roof is actually attached to the floor directly

Unlike everything else which is sitting on top of the walls this is actually a load-bearing part of the building and this is a very very simple design essentially the key thing here is that again it’s one block out or two blocks at the side

You can sort of mix it up a little bit but it’s also attached at one side or you could even you know do the whole modern thing where you do an s shape or something like that but the key thing here is that it’s just flat on the top

There’s nothing extra to it you can make it a bit more interesting by adding a block of iron if you so wish if this is a particularly big build you could detail it just by making what looks like an air conditioning vent on the top because those do exist in real life and

You could even add an antenna with iron bars so there are ways of detailing this if you want to sort of make it more realistic and it won’t impact it too much from the bottom you can’t even see the air conditioner but if you were to be flying around you would see the

Little details that you’ve put in as well so let’s move on now these are more sort of house styled roofs so this one is called the skillion and lean 2. so it’s a very simple one and it also dictates the shape of the house a little bit so this is to do with

The two sides you’ve got one big main mass and then you’ve got a secondary mass here and then you’ve got a very simple slab roof and it works all the way from the right to the left meeting at the top and it overhangs as all of our builds certainly do at the moment

There’s nothing really special about it other than it’s just slabs but i will say that if this massive mass here is too wide this will look incredibly silly so don’t go too big on this sort of thing and then on the secondary mass we’re just mimicking it and attaching it

To the main wall and then when you look at the pair of them together it looks quite nice so you could imagine that having you you know once you’ve got your details in this house would look really really nice so that is just another idea for you moving on we’ve got

Sort of a traditional barn look and this is called a gambrell and this is actually fairly easy to create and you might have seen this multiple times it does look like a barn so the idea is that it goes up at a quite a steep angle and then it goes a

Bit shallow at the top so i’ve done this with a staircase then a block staircase block that’s the sort of thing you might expect on your sort of viking style house but instead of going all the way to the top with that style you quickly smoothen off by using slabs

Until you get to the middle and then you replicate the other side again i’ve used a different color for the overhang to the middle part and i was trying to replicate a roof we don’t have a really red block that we could use with staircases and slabs so nether brick had

To do but you can see it produces quite a nice shape and this is great for any sort of barn work or any kind of house out in the forest kind of thing i think this works really really well moving on we’ve got my least favorite and i’m not

Afraid to say it i only put this in because i saw it in so many real life examples this is the butterfly roof and it basically looks like a v so it’s kind of like that one over there it slabs all the way in the middle works its way up

In a v-shape with an overhang on either side there’s really not that much to say about it it works well with modern builds i suppose and you could even make an m shape if you wanted to so you could do one yeah you get the idea

But it’s really not my cup of tea but if you guys are looking at this and you think oh that’s cool fair play to you go and give it a try see if you can make this work for your build so we’ll move swiftly away from the butterfly one this

Is the jerking head and this is sort of a nordic style i believe i’ve seen lots of examples of this and essentially it’s just like the gable from earlier except you reach sort of near the top and you just immediately flatten it off with some staircase and

What you do is you create a little diagonal that goes inwards towards the center of the building and this is particularly helpful if you have a really really wide build and your sort of your big a shape is going to be absolutely massive this helps make the top of it not seem like

It’s going into space so it sort of just smoothens over the edge so from this angle we still see that a shape but you can just see that it ever so slightly gently curves over and it makes it a softer roof overall and from the side it

Also has quite an appealing shape so you can use that as a little trick if you’ve got really really big a-frame roofs that you want to smoothen up and you could even bring this down a block or two depending on how big your roof is so

Moving on to the very final one of today’s episode is the hip and valley this is very common in suburban houses and instead of having your a-frame or your gable or whatever you want to call it you have your staircase go all the way around and

You just work your way up you work your way up until you get to the top and that creates almost a pyramid-like shape now it’s called hip and valley because we have a primary mass here and we have a secondary mass and the idea here is that

It connects in the middle so if we look from the top this bit connects to our central bit and it’s just that little bit shorter you want it to be one block or half a block just shy of your primary mass just so that it doesn’t become too

Dominant and that with that connection it creates this diagonal within the roof and it helps center the eyes where it’s supposed to look and this is a really cool way of making your roofs it’s a very simple way you can’t really go too far wrong as long as you start one block

Over the edge because as you can see not a very attractive thing when it just sits on the top and then you just work your way around if you do it systematically you shouldn’t come into any problems if you have a one block center you will just

Have to put a spruce slab on the top instead of a staircase otherwise you have this little problem here oh so that is 10 roof designs to show you in minecraft now i’ve gone over a bit more detail than in my first episode that i’m a little bit of ashamed of now so

Just try and take some of these in and i hope you do realize just how important roofs are and i know that ruse are a thing that people really struggle with in minecraft so hopefully this has broadened your horizons hopefully you’ll try some of these out and don’t be

Afraid to experiment all of these are obviously slightly different styles from one another whether you’re going for your average minecraft house with all the little tricks involved there or if you want to go slightly bigger and you work on the mansard or maybe a totally different culture and you go the

Japanese style or modern hopefully i’ve done a bit of everything here and sort of the suburban section down here i hope there’s just something here for you today and i hope you’ve enjoyed this video thank you very very much for watching good bye