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I have a very large home that I need to apply a roof tile similar to the image below as far as texture and randomness goes, although may be a two piece pan and barrel clay tile. I've seen some work some time ago in the Gallery here, a house in Italy, but could not find it now, the roof looked fantastic.

Mys view will not be close up.

I am modeling in Rhino. Am wondering whether to model all (VERY time consuming) or use displacement map in Maxwell?

That's a tough decision. Probably the easiest would be to use discplacement, though that won't give you the shadows where one tile overhangs the one beneath it. Plus, you will get old and die before the rendering clears (displacement being the easiest way I can think of to dramatically *increase* render times).

Modeling the tile is maybe not a bad idea, make sure you block the tile and "export blocks as instances" when you render. Perhaps using 5 or 6 slightly different materials assigned to different random groups of tile. There used to be a good plug-in for Rhino that had Random Select, Random Rotate, Random Move functions which would be useful to give the tiles variety. I think it was one of David Rutten's plug-ins/scripts.

Model the tiles themselves, then possibly used a displacement for the grungy moss stuff that is covering them. The tiles won't take more than a few hours to model and place

Is it possible to model 1 tile and clone it a few times!? Also maybe model one and use instances!? (This depends on your model package)

thx for the suggestions...all things considered, looks like right now the best way is to model using instances and then use a bump map to add "grunge" to the tiles....maybe v2 will be out soon enough to use the improved bump mapping