Roads on large-scale terrain?
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I'm in the design doc stage of figuring out workflow. I'm trying to figure out how to create roads that follow large terrain meshes, levels nearly 100 km across.
Roads should go up and down in elevation but stay fairly level across the width of the road.
To map the road texture, I'm guessing the roads will need to be extruded along paths. I'm thinking of stitching them to the terrain mesh, but they also have to deform the terrain some... cutting into a hill on one side will adding landfill on the other.
I'm thinking maybe I could blur the heightmaps along the road paths, which would give me the width-flattening deformations from the roads.
Someone here turned me on to World Machine, a great heightmap maker. I love the erosion. Anybody use this a lot? Maybe there's a way to deform the heightfield using nodes in their graph system?
Or maybe there's some better software for this kind of thing.
Roads should go up and down in elevation but stay fairly level across the width of the road.
To map the road texture, I'm guessing the roads will need to be extruded along paths. I'm thinking of stitching them to the terrain mesh, but they also have to deform the terrain some... cutting into a hill on one side will adding landfill on the other.
I'm thinking maybe I could blur the heightmaps along the road paths, which would give me the width-flattening deformations from the roads.
Someone here turned me on to World Machine, a great heightmap maker. I love the erosion. Anybody use this a lot? Maybe there's a way to deform the heightfield using nodes in their graph system?
Or maybe there's some better software for this kind of thing.
Replies
Although I do play a lot of World War 2 Online, which is 1/4 the size of western europe.
It looks like they extrude roads along a path, but they are not attached to the main ground mesh. Their terrain also does not deform.
Operation Flashpoint used this floating road technique as well.
I suppose you should be able to create a script that would weld the road surface into the world mesh.
Alex
After that I traced roads in illustrator, made 3 splines (major highways, regular roads and dirt roads), brought them into max, extruded a certain amount (made sure my "generate mapping coordinates" was turned on for easy texturing) then I duplicated them. I then projected the duplicate roads onto the surface, extruded the original again so they penetrated the terrain and cut the surface of the ground. Then simply combined them and I had my terrain with accurate road network and elevations. The engine we used at a time didnt support decent enough texture blending, so roads had to be cut out like that.
Sorry for a long post, hope it helps and my appologies if I repeated someone elses suggestions.
anyway, hey how do you get more than 8-bit bitmap output out of max anyway?
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use a format that supports it ? OpenEXR, HDRI
Per, I just save the render from Max as a 16bit TIFF, works OK for me.
Mop have you ever actually banned someone? I'd be mighty pissed if you tried to ban me. Not my fault Per has ADD.
However, I do have the might of Bearkub on my side, and he is usually happy to listen to any suggestions I might have
I just recently ran into the bucket of fun that is 16-bit images (max has a horrible time with them if you're using them as displacement), and Photoshop's support is a tad flaky at times, although CS2 actually makes 16/32-bit editing viable.
Seems everyone's doing terrain these days...
These suggestions are quite good. You could also draw out the road system in photoshop in a layer above your height map. Set the blending mode to overlay, and set the color to like 120 grey. It will create a slight displacement from the surounding terrain, but not carve holes into mountains. could be worth a shot
Some World Machine methods discussed here.
http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:peda...t=clnk&cd=6
With a link to this road tutorial...
http://www.coniserver.net/ubbthreads/showflat.php/Cat/0/Number/595946/page/0/fpart/all/vc/1
Also found another terrain app. No road tool yet, but something in development apparently.
http://www.cajomi.de/GeoControl/geocontrol_features.htm
Terrain linkage.
http://www.ridgecrest.ca.us/~jslayton/terrain.html
Here's the basic method I came up with yesterday.
1. World Machine. Whole-level heightfield.
2. 3ds Max. Displace a plane. Break into 1024s. Draw road splines. Bake roads from planes.
3. Photoshop. Blur heightfield using roads (+ border) to mask blur. This cuts/raises roadways into/out of terrain.
4. 3ds Max. Displace road splines and terrain with new heightmaps. Loft roads, contour but no banking (keeps road width flat), adjust UVs, remove self-intersections. Boolean union. Assign mat IDs. Select road edge verts, Relax. Create masks for shader transitions.
I'll post a pic when I have something worth looking at.
Oh no! he read that!
ha ha! uhhh...just kidding ha ha!
Anyhow. As promised, here's what I have so far. Mesh is a bit high res for the eventual app, there's some nasty optimizing from ProBooleans (anyone know how to avoid that?), and the textures need some luvin'...
Crits/ideas welcome.
How do you divide World Machine output into tiles? Like say I make a 8192^2 landscape, and want to output sixteen 1024^2 tiles. I'm getting close to buying it, but haven't really spent enough time with it yet.
I like how Battlefield 2 has seemingly-endless terrain. The edges are off limits, but they give you a natural horizon. They use a 3x3 grid of landscape meshes, the middle one using a higher-frequency heightmap.