Making a road /UVing them

[sirtoggle]

you can also convert BSP into a static mesh.

[danimal']

I think I'm being slightly misunderstood. I am not making a 'subtractive' levels. But the I made the road with Subtractive brushes. The Main ground is additive. and the road pieces are subtractive.

My bad, I misunderstood that

I completely understand your mode of implementation as mentioned in your workflow. But my main concern about the entire method is , I don't want to have to import like 20 different type of road bending and connectors ( which I know is based on 1 MESH in your 3D Application ).

That's up to you, it's a quality thing. BSP looks worse and runs worse. I find it somewhat mind boggling to choose to do that over "having to hit the Import button 20 times", but it's your time, not mine and only you can know how to best spend it

Really it's not the big bends that worry , it's the tiny 5-10 degrees bend. Refer to comical example 2, as comical as they are, with limited number of roads pieces, you literally get nightmares trying to make them seamless.

To me, it's so easy just to make a "10 degree turn" piece, a "20 degree turn piece", etc etc and just use them as "joints" between your straight piece. There really are a very limited amount of degree/turn angles on that map, like maybe 10 if I'm being overly cautious? So I'd have to import 1 straight piece, and 10 "joints" of various degrees that are really just slightly modified copies of each other. The work would be really minimal, the importing minimal, and you'd forever have a completely modular street system of much higher quality. You seem happy with your system though, so just go for it, everyone has different goals and priorities when making stuff.

[frozenfire2]

Ahh okay. I'll take a bit of look at that.

EDIT : I have been looking it in UDN for a while. Haven't actually try it. But I foresee some challenges in the featureset

No collision. The spline system does not currently deform the mesh's collision along the spline.
No interpolation between spline segments of world-up.
No tiling of meshes. Each segment of spline will stretch a single mesh from beginning to end.
All meshes begin and end at the SplineLoftActors that make up that segment. It is not possible to control the position of the mesh along the spline.

will try it when I get the time to

[Xendance]

I think I'm being slightly misunderstood. I am not making a 'subtractive' levels. But the I made the road with Subtractive brushes. The Main ground is additive. and the road pieces are subtractive.

Again, I agree there are 1001 ways to create bend meshes in 3D Application. But my point being is, a city will contain many degrees of bending. And unless you find a way to bend them IN the editor itself. You are going to have to import a massive amount of roads with different bending degree.

I completely understand your mode of implementation as mentioned in your workflow. But my main concern about the entire method is , I don't want to have to import like 20 different type of road bending and connectors ( which I know is based on 1 MESH in your 3D Application ).

So any way for me to bend the road slightly using Mesh? Really it's not the big bends that worry , it's the tiny 5-10 degrees bend. Refer to comical example 2, as comical as they are, with limited number of roads pieces, you literally get nightmares trying to make them seamless.

Use spline loft actors. That way you can bend the roads in any way you like with static meshes.

[frozenfire2]

I think I'm being slightly misunderstood. I am not making a 'subtractive' levels. But the I made the road with Subtractive brushes. The Main ground is additive. and the road pieces are subtractive.

Again, I agree there are 1001 ways to create bend meshes in 3D Application. But my point being is, a city will contain many degrees of bending. And unless you find a way to bend them IN the editor itself. You are going to have to import a massive amount of roads with different bending degree.

I completely understand your mode of implementation as mentioned in your workflow. But my main concern about the entire method is , I don't want to have to import like 20 different type of road bending and connectors ( which I know is based on 1 MESH in your 3D Application ).

So any way for me to bend the road slightly using Mesh? Really it's not the big bends that worry , it's the tiny 5-10 degrees bend. Refer to comical example 2, as comical as they are, with limited number of roads pieces, you literally get nightmares trying to make them seamless.

[danimal']

May I politely disagree with that, Danimal and allow me to defend my implementation.

Yes you may!

Flat roads can be flats, but they can contain many different degrees of curves and bend in a real wold example.

Right, which is why I prefaced my comments with "if that's the kind of track you want". Your initial example was only a simple L-curve. As I already said, the real issue is if you want a fully 3d track with numerous angles and slopes, but since you only showed a simple L-curve, that is what I was responding to and there's no reason to do a simple L-curve with BSP.

I've tried stock modelling the roads , I realized 2 issues.

1) Making road in 3D Meshes actually creates road that is elevated from the ground. I'm not sure how to explain this, basically they're ADDITIVE, you can't make them subtractive ( sinking into the ground ). To give the visual of sidewalk, either you have to tile another whole bunch of sidewalks at the side or; model the road together with the sidewalk, which will be much more messier when you have sidewalks of different size.

Very easy to address with meshes. 1) Lower your terrain around the road, and now it's "sunken in". 2) Make the sidewalk PART of your road mesh, that way it's always rising above the road, matches the roads contour and doesn't have to be placed separately. I would do #2. Subtractive levels are a nightmare, I'd really, really re-think doing that.

2) Meshes Road is also not very flexible . . .
you see, with meshes, I find it hard to tilt the road to make 'less than 90 degrees curve' or even a small curve/bend. As a result . my whole city becomes like a grid.

First, in the end there's really not much of a difference between manipulating vertices via the Geometry Mode on BSP, and manipulating them in a 3d program (frankly its easier in a 3d program). All BSP is, is a mesh. You're still pushing/pulling vertices. Unfortunately, BSP runs far less efficiently than a static mesh and allows for a LOT less control/quality.

Second, I appreciate the "examples", but they're kind of comical. Yes we all know 2 flat pieces don't create a curve... no one's suggesting you use completely straight pieces for curved sections. There's several methods to EASILY bend an otherwise straight piece of geometry. As mentioned, you can deform a piece of geometry with a spline (curve). Also, virtually every 3d program has a "bend" deformer as well. Simply bend your straight piece in to whatever shape you desire.

The work flow is this: create a straight piece of road, with sidewalks as part of the mesh if you so choose. UV it, texture it. Then simply deform it into a curved shape using either a spline or a bend deformer as needed. This way you really only create the mesh once then simply bend it for each subsequent copy, and re-use it where possible. Use snapping options to get the pieces to snap together properly. In the end you'd only end up making 1 mesh that, again, can be a MUCH higher quality than the BSP and will run more efficiently.

Ultimately, you can do what you want, but subtractive mode has some severe limitations and BSP won't look very good and won't perform very well in the larger scheme of things.

[Pmt3ddy]

I think you can model all sorts of roads by using the spline and lathe tool on 3ds max. That way it's also easy to adjust road heights and whatever else you need.

But needles to say, it wont be easy sticking it onto a terrain or fitting road peaces seamlessly.

Edit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ9V3Y0GElo Found this Spline road modeling tutorial on youtube, It's very helpful.

[frozenfire2]

If you're going to do flat roads, I don't think that's a very good solution both in terms of quality/control and performance. I agree with the original responses. If that's the kind of track you want, you can just make a straight piece and a bent piece, UV and texture, and then just instance it everywhere. It will perform much, much better. It also has the benefit of allowing you to hand draw/customize it, allowing you to get a much nicer piece of road than using BSP.

May I politely disagree with that, Danimal and allow me to defend my implementation. Flat roads can be flats, but they can contain many different degrees of curves and bend in a real wold example. I've tried stock modelling the roads , I realized 2 issues.

1) Making road in 3D Meshes actually creates road that is elevated from the ground. I'm not sure how to explain this, basically they're ADDITIVE, you can't make them subtractive ( sinking into the ground ). To give the visual of sidewalk, either you have to tile another whole bunch of sidewalks at the side or; model the road together with the sidewalk, which will be much more messier when you have sidewalks of different size.

2) Meshes Road is also not very flexible. Flat roads has its fair share of flexibility. Let me explain, I am targeting a close-to-real City/Urban look in my map and I realized that real cities have roads with different angle bending. Let's look at one reference of a city map and see how many types of bend/curves there is.




you see, with meshes, I find it hard to tilt the road to make 'less than 90 degrees curve' or even a small curve/bend. As a result . my whole city becomes like a grid.

You see. Even small bend gives me trouble. See the pic below.

Cannot Tilt


Cannot Bend


I'm not saying it couldn't be done with meshes. but it's going to need a lot of different bend/curves pieces and then what about sidewalk?

As for this method I'm posting I can customize the degree of bending, the length of bend, even the SEGMENTS for the bend, the depth of the sidewalk. All in the editor itself.

[freek3d]

Bsp

any particular reason you watn to do it in BSP?

becouse it would probably be far easier (and more efficient )
to create a simpe tileset of roads in 3DS max or maya?

next to that you could add a simple tileset of pieces of kirb.
(so the road is no elevated,)
this will make the roads look better.
and it wil allow for curvy roads. and with higher centre like most roads have.

also static meshes run a bit lighter.

so if you are not scared of modelling, i'd do that.
(although you did emphasise without any meshes...)

anyway hope it is of some use.

greetings F

[Hboybowen]

ahh took me a while before I got back doing this road thingy. I've found to make very nice road , and good performance, totally without any imported mesh. Not sure if anybody might find this useful, but it sure would help me if someone would have taught me this earlier.

I'm not aware of any easier way to do this. So if there is, please advise. So here's my way.

Fully BSP-based


Easy to UV. Lines seamlessly continues


Nice and Smooth Curves




So how to make the road?
Use the Curved Stairs as builder brush.
Set Step height to 0 ( this is important so the road won't rise )
Set Add to First Step, this would determine the thickness of your road
To adjust how SHARP You want your road corner to be adjust the 'Inner Radius'. More values means a less sharp corner. 0 Means a 90 degree turn.

Normally for roads, I find it nice if you use subtract BSP to cut into the shape of the ground, making the side higher and becomes a sidewalk automatically. Alternatively you can add static mesh on the sides as well.

So there you go.

visually it works dunno about performance we shall see though thnx for sharing this

[danimal']

If you're going to do flat roads, I don't think that's a very good solution both in terms of quality/control and performance. I agree with the original responses. If that's the kind of track you want, you can just make a straight piece and a bent piece, UV and texture, and then just instance it everywhere. It will perform much, much better. It also has the benefit of allowing you to hand draw/customize it, allowing you to get a much nicer piece of road than using BSP.

The real issue is if you want to do a fully 3d, twisting track (e.g., Wipeout), which makes doing "stock pieces" much, much more difficult. But if you primarily just want largely flat roads, definitely do it via meshes and instancing. Taking the cryengine bait, all you ever really have to ask a cryfanboy is this: if cryengine really is better, why do studios keep licensing unreal over crysis, it's not like they don't know about crytek... do you really think that people who do this for a living haven't investigated both engines in detail, the tools, etc, and are consistently choosing an inferior product at such a high price? If you do think that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell to you.

[frozenfire2]

ahh took me a while before I got back doing this road thingy. I've found to make very nice road , and good performance, totally without any imported mesh. Not sure if anybody might find this useful, but it sure would help me if someone would have taught me this earlier.

I'm not aware of any easier way to do this. So if there is, please advise. So here's my way.

Fully BSP-based


Easy to UV. Lines seamlessly continues


Nice and Smooth Curves




So how to make the road?
Use the Curved Stairs as builder brush.
Set Step height to 0 ( this is important so the road won't rise )
Set Add to First Step, this would determine the thickness of your road
To adjust how SHARP You want your road corner to be adjust the 'Inner Radius'. More values means a less sharp corner. 0 Means a 90 degree turn.

Normally for roads, I find it nice if you use subtract BSP to cut into the shape of the ground, making the side higher and becomes a sidewalk automatically. Alternatively you can add static mesh on the sides as well.

So there you go.

[Fartuess]

I guess you can create roads with base straight road model (with more edge rings across model) and spline tool (look creeper branches on building in GDC map)

[Havoc89]

I've made a fairly complex dirt road with lots of twists turns and forks using decals. Only really 3 decals (fade at one end, middle, fade at the other end) Works pretty well though it is a pain staking solution. It does have some fairly good results. Although I dont think it would be a good idea to use them for paved roads, for that I think it would be best to create the geometery in a 3d app, UV it and then export it into the engine.

Here is what my decal roads look like, I've emphasized them a little bit so you can see them. Hope it helps.

[SHOT]http://i47.tinypic.com/16lgww6.jpg[/SHOT]

[KazeoHin]

I'm sure Spline-loft actors are designed to bend static meshes. So long as your road mesh has enough verts, the bend should be smooth.