3ds max - roads and terrain

JJagwire

Hi, I am fairly new to 3d modeling, as well as the polycount forums. (1st post!)

I am making a map for a game in 3ds max, and I'm constantly running into problems with roads and terrain. I finally figured out a good workflow for creating them -

1. Loft on a spline
2. Create shape from border of the road mesh
3. Shapemerge the terrain, cookie cutter mode
4. Ant-stitcher - Best. Script. EVER. It combines your road and terrain into one mesh. I have nightmares of trying to do this without the script.


but once I get the base mesh done, I feel pretty much screwed when trying to make edits.

For example, I want to make a smooth hill here





The best way I can think of is selecting rows of verts one at a time and typing in all the positions, which works great and all but is way too time consuming

I would really appreciate help with this problem and any tips or suggestions for working with roads, terrain, and level design in general inside of 3ds max. Thank you.

poopipe

relax it

mLichy

Turn on Soft Selction in the Modify Panel under the Sub Object options. That will help.
There is also a push/pull paint brush rollout in there too.

JJagwire

Hi guys, sorry I should have mentioned that I tried a lot of things, including the three suggestions here. Unfortunately any form of relaxing no matter what constraint, distorts the quads and generally makes things worse, and soft selection will never give me a perfectly smooth curve either, unless I'm doing it wrong.

But anyways, a miracle pretty much just happened. I was watching random youtube videos, extremely close to falling asleep and discovered loop tools. I'll post how it works next

JJagwire

Believe me I spent hours searching before I made this thread, not sure how I never found this..

Step 1 - Select edge loops like so


Step 2 - Switch to vertex and select a loop near the center


Step 3 - Click "Curve" and "Space" and that's it. Here's the result!