Italy progress

Putting some winding roads into Italy.



Edit: And a shot of some walls and vegetation:

 

A few more roads and tweaking the node setup in Blender. Keep in mind the map looks awful at this stage and also looks deceptively early in development. There's lots of behind the scenes stuff that isn't represented by these pics

So a road cross section gets extruded along a curve and tweaked (precise camber, bumps, width):



Then I render an image. It just renders the roads and other stuff I've added and it does a whole bunch of things to them, essentially a sequence of actions like blur, combine, levels etc. It then merges it with the heightmap output from World Machine to produce a heightmap ready for import with no further action required:



That looks quite messy and confusing but it outputs a nice road:



Due to all the operations done in the second image the roads all have nice falloffs and blend well into the surrounding terrain and it's all procedural so it's possible to drive the road, decide you want the jump-maybe to be a jump-certainly and you just hit render. Not only that but it's possible to generate a mask (you can see the white area on the grey background) which will be used to set the correct groundmodel:

 

Updated plan (it's still just a very rough outline, more symbolic of what will go where rather than exact):

 

Some more work on Italy. After quite a lot of planning we figured out how we're going to build the city and have started. Only a few parts are ready but some of the complicated stuff is out of the way now.

 

Created a bunch of different line markings for use in the city and roads, scattered around the test area to see how they look:



And some cobblestone:



Aaaand another:

 

Some decals:

 

Random collection of parts I'll be using for guardrails and such.

 

A sense of scale in italy:

 

Some switchbacks coming along

 

Here's the current layout. It's still quite rough especially the joins of roads (they'll be put in when the roads are close to being final). Still quite a few more to come.

 

Built the first roundabout, still needs more work, probably a few more materials:

 

Another roundabout



The highway feeds into the one above

 

Refinted some more (grass needs tweaking):



I've also started to carve out some dirt roads on the side of the mountain some more and refine them as well.

 

Two way to try the new roundabout:

@Nadeox1's style:

Video - Click to Play - Direct Link

and mine :

Video - Click to Play - Direct Link

 

Modeled some palm trees:

 

Some more work, breaking up the silhouette:

 

Some guard rails, still very much in progress

 

Current situation, if you compare with the last you can see a lot of the roads have been fine tuned.

 

stuck in a bridge over the highway