How would you do a road of dirt ?

[Hex0n]

Hi,

I am working on landscapes and I would like to add a road of dirt like this one :



So I know that I need a texture and a new layer, but how can I get the traces of the wheels to be parallel to the road ?



Thanks

[ambershee]

I'd actually use decals. Make a good set of tiling decal textures for various road shapes and line them up carefully. Make sure they don't overlap with other decals as much as possible since that's a performance killer.

Another potential alternative is to use meshes (which can be deformed using splineloft actors).

[box-0]

the best thing to do is to create a set of uv for the mesh that have the correct mapping you will need for the traces of the wheels.. in example if you create your 3d assets in 3d max you will need to map the road geometry using a spline (commonly called spline mapping, look for tutorials on the internet if needed). After you created the correct mapping in a different channel than the main diffuse channel just apply the texture of the traces on this one using the texture coordinate node in the material editor... this way you wont have any performance issues compared to spline loft actors or decals since an extra UV channel on a mesh is for sure less heavy than any other method to archieve this result. If you want i can explain you further this process but i will need you to send me the mesh you want to do this on.
Bye, Box-0.

[Hex0n]

Okay, I understand the second method with using a mesh but I think that I will simply use decals since I still have a lot of work to do and not much time !

Thanks for the help