Hi!

I've created something approaching a working method of adding a road to some simple terrain.


I'm using a pair of techniques I found in a forum thread from 2010. The first technique, that cuts the road from the terrain, creates a metaball tube and then the ‘shatter’ option in the new Boolean Sop. To place the power-lines I'm lofting a point along the road curve and then just using Copy To Points.



So far, I think it's working pretty well. It can handle overlaps and pinching, and it's relatively easy to place objects along the road. There's currently a problem with the edges of the geometry. This can be fixed by extending the length of the spline off the edges of the geometry in some way, but for my purposes right now, that's a minor issue.

I'm kind of at a loss as to how to take this to the next step though, like separating the sidewalk into panels, or getting something approaching reasonable UV's onto the road geometry.

To people who have done this, where do I go next?

Here's my attempt. Not that I'm an expert, but from what I've seen it looks like games folk tend to treat roads like a clean poly ribbon, and overlay it onto the geo, rather than cut directly into the terrain like you've done.

Anyway, was an interesting challenge. The uv's down the road can be got directly by setting curveu on the original curve and transferring.

uv's across the road I've done by measuring the distance from the nearest curve point. Then to be able to get a clean 0-1 range, I compare the position relative to the curve center, and the curve bitangent which I get from a polyframe sop (which gives you a vector across the curve).

It's not perfect, but might give you some ideas.

-matt

Thanks mestela! This is really interesting. I did not know about the polyframe sop. That is going to be very handy for my other spline based shenanigans.

I'm still not entirely sure I'm reading the wrangles right, but I'm going to try to figure that out when I have a little more time.

Your results are really impressive, especially for the road, but they do highlight the fact that there's only so much you can do with directly booleaned geometry.

You can't fix these UV issues with the current geometry.

For my current project, I can probably work with this, as my roads are aligned to the grid… but I'm going to take another pass at this. All you need, technically, are slices going through the geometry at set intervals (though this does make pinching more of an issue).

Thanks again!