Houdini Engine for UE4 is coming... just saying. The traces of it are already in existing Houdini builds. If anyone is interested in giving a chance to Houdini and would like to use Houdini Engine power directly (without baking o disk in Houdini) inside their engine that doesn't have support for it yet (if ever), you can…
I use Unreal Engine 4 on a daily basis and that's how we proceed indeed. Imagine you're just texturing a big quad, with all your logic/tiling inside the shader itself. The you bend this quad in-engine, duplicate it along a spline and that's it. There's even a tutorial from Epic Games about this specific feature in UE4:…
To the OP: What engine are you using? If you don`t have a dedicated tool for making roads you`re going to have to get your hands dirty. Your first question was how do they do it in those AAA games. It was directly answered above. They have a AAA game solution: dedicated tools. Your next question(s) deal more with HOW to…
Since that stuff is often tied strongly into gameplay and leveldesign, there are dedicated tools built into the engine for it. For Need For Speed it definitely is, I'm pretty much certain it is like that for Forza as well. Unreal 4 and Cryengine both have some support for basic roads. No crazy intersections and road…
Hey, thanks for the advice :) I talked a lot with colleagues about this. Seemingly, modeling part is kind of still a bit blurry, but we know how to texture the roads in our engine and how to deal with the tiling. We will use floating geometry [for tiling parts], decals [bounding box, placed in engine editor] and vertex…
I will have to model for an custom engine, which doesn't have any roadtools at the moment. I have done some things like this before, but getting some more complex stuff was very very labor intensive, almost everything had to be done by moving single vertices which made my head blow. So i'm looking for some sort of…
Quality that you can achieve in Houdini is totally your personal choice. It's all about interactivity in viewport. If you make a tool that throws million poly models around like crazy, you will bog down your system fast. When you finished creating your road system you could bake it down, so low quality model could be…
I don't know about the automatic generation part, but on texturing I had good results using a three way blend material in ue4 (or microblend in other engines): - one super clean tileable 512px asphalt texture, plus more for burnt rubber or sandy/dirty variations (thess could be even smaller). Each has albedo, normal, etc.…