Hi again,

I have a question regarding roads.

Having made my terain from patches of simple terain mesh and welded the smaller ones into a much larger whole I wanted to add a road.

So to do this, I made a new simple curved mesh and textured it with the road I wanted then welded duplicates of the original end on end and formed it into a curved road that I was happy with.

I took my new road mesh and laid it onto my terrain.

Now, in one tutorial I watched about doing it this way they said to "fix" the new road mesh slightly above the ground level but it looks quite odd.

I decided to lay it flat ie on top of the terrain which doesnt look to bad except it looks flat. I want to add a 3d look to my road and have tried various techniques with no joy.

Ie curving the sides of the road up but I then have trouble getting the terrain mesh to mee the sides and curve up with it.

I have tried to use the advanced patch editor "Y" to raise the terrain but all that does is bring the terrain mesh up through the road mesh on top of it which causes patches in my road mesh ie instead of the road mesh rising, the terrain pokes through my road.

Im really stuck here, so is there a way to make my roads look 3d ie used, and carved out of the terrain like groves in it like truck tyre tracks etc...

Hope you can help!

Cheers gang

I usually do it the other way around..

I keep my road selected and then move parts of it down towards the actual ground level (Also I remove the terrainmesh from beneath the road, because it's not needed there). That way you can blend the edges nicely into the surrounding ground and make tracks in the road as wel.

Here is a screenshot from codradiant.



Larger image

It's all done with 5x5 terrain mesh.

The middle mesh, the road, is narrower at 256 units. The center three vertice columns are raised to provide a "hump". And the rows are shifted to provide a "curved" look. The road texture is Natural, and shifted vertically at the seems until they line up. If you have a uniform asphalt texture, you can Cap the road texture.

The grass terrain edge vertices are stretched over to meet the road edges and the texture is Capped.

Thanks Guys, I'll give that a try!

Well it worked, I laid my road patch on top of my terrain and raised the three middle vertices making the road campher.
Looks great!!!

Can I use the same technique to round the tops of walls?
So instead of flat wall tops, I can round them off?

My concern is that I read the more sides an object has to make them look round the greater the strain when rendering.

Thanks

I have never had good luck mixing curved patches and terrain meshes. The usual solution is when you can overlap the edges or sink the terrain patch below the curve patch edge bu this can cause weird lighting.

I always make my roads with terrain patches so I dont have the vertices misaligned. The easiest way is to start with a pretty high density terrain (not too high) Decide where in the terrain the road would go and slide the 'road' vertices left and right to make the curves. They will bump against other verts so adjust them accordingly. I like to use 3 verts for the width of my roads so the road can be sunk or raised slightly.

When making roads myself I start with a curved patch mesh shaped how I want. Then I create a terrain mesh which I manipulate until it closely matches the patch mesh. Then I use the pseudo-curved patch mesh with my terrain.