Tips for building roads?

8-Bit

Hey all!

I'm currently working on a simulation for work where I must create road networks within maya (Not the most effective way to do it I know). But that is what the client wants.

I'd like to know if anybody has any good tips for creating smooth road networks in a much more manual way. The roads I'm building have many variations in elevation and it is making it difficult to create something that does not cause the cars to drive like they're hitting several potholes.

My solution for the moment is to add many many edge loops and try my best to smooth things out with the scale brush as well as the smooth tool in some areas. I'm trying not to go overboard with the loops as the simulation is what you'd call a little primitive in terms of graphics capabilities.

.morph3us

maybe you could cut out the streets out of your groundplate and then give it a little thickness?
i'm no maya user, sry

8-Bit

That's actually not a bad idea for roads. Though it will not work for the current project I'm working on. In this project, the ground plane is built segmented. It's inner city stuff and we've created what is essentially islands for the grassy areas and sidewalks with the roads as their own separate mesh that goes between them and fills everything in.

Pola

I'm not entirely sure what you need to achieve without a visual aid. Though as far as roads go, are you able to do modular pieces? And link those together, perhaps throw in some deformers if you need a bit more variance/control in some places.

You could also possibly extrude the road along a curve?

8-Bit

Pola,

Unfortunately we aren't creating modular pieces for this project. I can't go into detail, but we're recreating a city and it must match the real world as accurately as possible. We are using the method of extruding the roads along a curve, but I am still getting some choppy areas. I think I may have to just keep adding edge loops to smooth things out, though I'm still curious to hear how others have handled similar situations.

Thank you for your input! I hope we get to do something a little more modular in future projects.

Mark Dygert

Have you tried using splines. In max we can paint splines on the surface of another mesh and then set the spline to rectangle, or "sweep" a profile shape over the surface spline.

In an ideal world, roads would be built like they are in CryEngine... oh such a sweet system.

http://youtu.be/e-QFE0AJM3U

Bruno Afonseca

What I do is make splines for the roads, smoothing out curves etc. until it looks good. Then I run a Normalize Spline modifier to break it up in even pieces, turn all the control points into corners and run a sweep modifier on it to get the road mesh.

If you need the roads to camber or change width, then you can make the roads with lofts instead of sweep. You can make various shapes for the road path making it lean inwards, outwards, etc.

And I encourage you to split the path into smaller pieces so you don't get overwhelmed! Intersections probably need to be hand modeled.

Hey Vig, what do you mean by "painting" the splines?

Mark Dygert

So in, max you can paint a spline on the surface of any other mesh or a collection of meshes. It's a bit like object scatter but leaves behind a spline instead of objects. There are a few scripts that do the same thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwHJgfdOFDw

8-Bit

I didn't think of that fonfa. That's a really good idea. Using splines would definitely help maintain a smooth surface overall. Thanks for the tip.

Mark that's really awesome. Unfortunately we didn't end up having a full terrain built in this case, but that's definitely something to keep in mind for future projects. They have plugins like that for Maya as well ?