Roads and intersections

[Jon Berntsen]

Hi. I know this topic has been written about several times before, but I saw this image on evermotion http://www.evermotion.org/files/tutorials_content/uploads/nr_pushkin2_948.jpg, and I think the road looks good. What would be the best approach to get to this result? I am using max/vray but general methods might as well be the answer.

 

Also, I wonder how other people would take on such a task like building the roads, pavements, curbings, plots. All splines? Would you attach the road with the rest, or leave it as a separate object?

 

Maybe vraytexcomp used on top of a good asphalt material? The intersections are never all 9o degrees, so it would not be enough to solve with normal spline roads with constant.

[frog_a_lot]

Vray Dist tex in blend map will give you the dark/light areas around the edges of the roads.

Use the kerbs as your Distance object.

[Amen]

I have not used it, but shouldn't Railclone work really well for this?

[Scott Dombrowski]

I've done a few civil projects. Railclone does work well for curbs and road stripes. You just need a spline for Railclone to use as a source. For the road geometry, if you have a completely flat site, you can generate this easily with an edge of pavement spline that I usually can grab from a site plan from the engineers. If it's not a flat site and you're really lucky, the engineers have designed it in Civil 3D which you can import with Civil View. I am usually not that lucky. In this case I draw a cross section of the road and the road centerline as spline shapes and use the sweep modifier to extrude the section along a centerline. I've had some success using the terrain compound object and 3D splines of the outline and centerlines of intersections. The Populate:Terrain plugin might work well for this too, but I haven't tried it yet.

[Chris MacDonald]

For stuff like this I use splines to model the road edges, then use a script such as Populate's "Terrain" to subdivide it in to manageable quads then a relax modifier to smooth it all out (only necessary if you've got complicated levels). The splines you used initially can also be used to create curbs either using a sweep, or as said before railclone for more detail.

 

As for texturing, I'd probably go for the Vray Distance Tex in a composite map (I use this in preference to the Vray comp tex because it gives you far more options for layering) to create a blend between dirty/clean parts of the road. If this doesn't give you enough control you could always do a UV Unwrap which is very effective for adding texture detail.

 

For plots/fences/walls I'd use railclone.