Modeling curvy roads while maintaining proportion?

bpears

Hello, I have modeled basic modular road chunks,; straight, T-intersections, 4-way intersection, corner turns. This works well for the clean cut parts. But for curvy roads that curve all over the place, how do you keep proportions in road width and sidewalk width?

Is there a way to simply add divisions across a straight road chunk and drag it out to make curves, while keeping proportions easily? Or is this something I'll just have to eyeball closely?

Using Maya 2012.
Thanks

Money

I used this plugin for making a racing track, you create one short block in the X-axis then, assign it as a object, draw a curve and click "deform object along path" which will duplicate and snap the segments using a FFD deformer.

http://www.creativecrash.com/script/duplicate-along-path

I have bookmarked somewhere several more plugins that duplicate along path if you want to try others, though this one did the job best for me because it could snap the verts together.

However it won't be much useful if you plan to roll the track on the side (like in some scifi racers) because its really more for facing upward direction. In those cases I used a different workflow which was a bit of pain. Draw a curve, rebuild it uniformly to some 50-100 division, extrude a curve to nurb surface, then manually tweak roll on the side, convert to poly, UV the track so it takes a bit of a time. But this plugin did a pretty great job so far and keeps segment's UVs so you can make a track really quickly.

bpears

awesome! I'll give this a try, thank you.

bpears

How do I save the mesh as a curve and get rid of it's lattice and other things? Is it possible to export as FBX?

Money

Select the one under (you'll know when pink lattice lines over it) and delete the history. You can easy export the segment as .fbx file, though depending on the size of the mesh you might better break it into smaller chunks for rendering (if you're using it for a game for example).
In my case, this is the track what I got and the profile used to build it.

http://abload.de/img/trackpico8ssj.jpg
http://abload.de/img/trackpic2c6s6u.jpg

Also, you haven't mentioned what will you be using it for, but if you're using Unity for example, there are several plugins for making roads which would be a better solution performance wise. Custom modeled track did a good job for me so didn't have to use those.