Hi Paul
Apologies for the very late reply.. I've been so incredibly busy, which is great, but also meant that I have not visited the forum for some time. Anyway, I have emailed the scene as it was sent to me. It is basically just the roof planes, originally modelled in AutoCAD, which I imported into Max and then saved as a max file, I also included the image, that was initially produce, using a basic render and photoshop, which obviously wasn't as realistic, as my friend wanted it to be. He had attempted to model the tiles individually.. but never had the time ad try as I might, I could not solve it either.. My only suggestions were to model them individually, which would take forever or to use textures and perhaps displacement, which was not exactly ideal. but would be easier.
Anyway as I say, despite my very late reply, I have emailed the very basic Max scene and the very simple render of how the building itself was to look, for you to play with... I will be very interested to see if you can solve it and an explanation as to how and even more interesting is the new tiles library I noticed mentioned... I look forward to seeing what you come up with on this tricky roofing problem
Many thanks for your prompt reply and once again my apologies for my very late response.