modular soft surface help

JoshWilkinson

I'm making road medians but having trouble making the soil of the median tile because the border edges of all the soft surface places are hardened. Has anybody ever run into this and solved the issue before?

fade1

you have to manually adjust the normals of the corresponding vertices. let them point in the same direction with the set vertex normal tool and everything should be shaded smooth.

Butthair

The best thing I can think for this situation is not to model the ground. Keep it a flat plane, then, within engine, or set up in the material, have a vertex paint expression allowing you to paint into one of the channels an offset function.

This means you'd be vertex "sculpting".

Assuming this would be in engine, you could alternatively use a terrain/landscape to fill the median, it would just need to be a thing strip size.

If nothing else, make various sizes (1x1, 1x2, 1x3, 1x4, L-shapes, cross-sections, etc.) You can always cover the seams with decals, foliage or a strip of concrete.

JoshWilkinson

lol "butthair". I like it.

I actually solved the issue real easily. Fade1 pretty had it nailed down; there was a problem with the vertex normals not registering correctly. I just selected the vertex of the two tiling sides and went to Normals> Average Normals. Literally one step.

Thanks all the same though

Butthair

Awesome. Thanks for the solution, that's a pretty cool way.