Road creation question

[Gheromo]

Greetings everyone!

I am new to cryengine and building a portfolio piece.
I had some UDK experience before, but as a student / junior artist I have question to those who are more experienced.

to the point.
I am trying to make a believable road in the desert, but I am not quite sure what would be best approach to do it.
Im mainly concerned how to create a smooth transition from road surface to soil. like on picture figure 2. What I have at the moment is a tiling 2k texture for asphalt which can be seen that it is tiling badly and needs more love.

However I am concerned would it be best to make a texture that would cover all road from left to right with soil on edges going over asphalt itself and transparency alpha on the edges of soil, in order to blend it with terrain texture? Would 2k texture be enough for such task?

Or is it better to make 2 extra copies of the road tool on the sides of the main road and make some sort of the transition with soil texture?

A good explanation or tips would be much appreciated.


http://i.imgur.com/hbTo2.jpg

[AlexCatMasterSupreme]

you need to use the alpha channel to make that part blend, look at the standard materials that come with the SDK.

[Olli.]

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/15275414/roads.PNG
heres an example of road construction. I've used 2 tarmac strip textures (1024x512) to get the base lanes in there.
Then i've painted the road markings with white line textures. I've got two textures, one for the dotted line and one for the striped line (1024x32) and one for the continuous line (512x32). With those two you can get pretty much all thinkable road markings with the exception of some special features like arrows or texts (which you can implement with decals)

to get the shoulders on the road you can either have custom road textures for them with a dirt pattern, or then you can use an alpha map on the tarmac to get the gradual transition. Since you're doing a very long strip of road, you'll probably want to alternate between these two methods to break tiling.

To fix tiling in general its usually a good idea to construct your road from various elements, instead of having one texture for the whole road. Elements that could go in your scene:
the tarmac base
skid marks
dirt marks from someone slipping off road
lane wear
small water puddles leftover from rain or something
cracks

just go crazy with it. you can have 255 different layers of decals, which should be sufficient.