Is there a way to make road paths with WM?
Thanks
Hi
If your terrain is flat, you can do it more or less easily with the use of the expander device (min mode).
The Rocky Run macro might also produce some irregular roads, but these will be horizontal always.
But there is no native support for 100% decent road paths that crawl arround the landscape and keep horizontallity. That can’t be done with a macro, because this “horizontallity” is dependant on the path of the road, which you can’t extract from an image or macro.
However, I’m sure it won’t be long for a roads “device” to appear shortly after this new version of WM is released…
Cheers,
Thanks.
Do you want control over the roads, or just random roads?
If the former, you’ll need to create the paths in Photoshop or another graphics application and then import them via the File Input device.
If you just want random roads, the Ribbon macro can be added atop the terrain to give raised paths. If you use the Blur device masked by the path, you’ll level out the road to the average height of the underlying terrain which will give a decent approximation to a road.
Well, what I am doing right now is: export the output to bmp, open with photoshop, duplicate the layer, posterize it by 10, 15. Then I draw a road over the terrain and I use the gradient tool to smooth out the road and preserve the elevations and slopes or the road. Blur doesn’t work very well with the game engine that I use, to make a decent road.
If you want to understand how I do that, I made a tutorial explaining the steps. I start with WM, then I use gimp, wilbur and photoshop, and then I finish it by inserting the terrain with a multitexture shader inside a game. You can find it here:http://www.coniserver.net/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=595946&an=0&page=0#595946.
The result is something like this:
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i was working on something similiar to this a while back, i never managed to make it work, because any thing i did, made terragen react to the overlay as though it were a heightfield, worked fine for trying to use it in motocross madness, but for flat tracks, id say the easiest method would be to create a track in photoshop (making sure the entire track stays the same shade) and just use that as an overlay… world machine might handle overlays better than TG does, im not sure, never tried it in world machine…lol
Well, if the road is supposed to follow the terrain along its path, but not across it (must not bank to match the terrain), I don’t see a way to do it with existing devices, as you can’t ensure that normals on that part are hoizontal in the desired direction.
I am cooking up a device for making roads, but this is going to take a while to code… Because I don’t have that much spare time, and because I still need to figure out how the user specifies a path for the road (path file input, sckeletal extraction from a heightfield, user-drawing, coordinate text boxes, etc).
Oh, and don’t set your expectations too high, because my first version will only allow poligonal roads (formed by lines) 