Sadly not enough room in the title to say my question; So in the terrain editor, is there an effective way to make smooth roads with the default terrain manipulation tools? Right now I have repeatedly used the slope smooth tool on a road many times and its still quite bumpy. Am I missing a setting that actually makes this tool umm, useful? With the lack of money to buy software, or Blender skills to edit the heightmap of my world as a 3D model, its the unfortunate alternative I am left with. Anyone got anything that might help me work with the crippled terrain editor?
No, there isn't. LFJHutch's tutorial is a very good starting point to learn the required Blender skills, it gives you a rough outline of the process and makes it easy to Google tutorials for each individual step. Failing that, clever use of image editing tools and their Bezier curve functionality will get you a long way, but will probably be as hard to learn as Blender.
Ok. I was dreading that, since its much easier to work inside the terrian editor. You can get stuff in the editor, but its so painstakingly hard. I will look at the Blender tutorial again, but assuming the Export terrain heightmap button works, I mightaswell get the roads I want located in the editor before I go messing around there. Thanks!
Hmm, what would the Softness Curve do in terms of making the tools a bit easier to work with in terms of road smoothing? just currious. I have learned from experience that its impossible to make roads in the terrain editor smooth enough for driving, but I wonder what you can do from the editor.
"impossible to make roads in the terrain editor smooth enough for driving" -> Is the question still what softness does? It's a standard 'brush' setting - http://design.tutsplus.com/articles...vs-soft-brushes-in-adobe-photoshop--cms-23144 So you'll rarely set it to anything other than 100 in this case since we want everything to blend smoothly. Don't start to get your hopes up about these tools. If you achieve a 'flat' road you'll soon realize that you need some camber or crown on the road... then it's all out the window again.
I've never liked them, never have. They just dont work for roads. I know what softness does. This crippled terrain editor just puts band aids on the problem. I will mess around with Blender soon, since I am getting quite tired of working with tools that dont work for roads.
Sorry Driv3r1142, I misread your post! I see now that you were asking specifically about the softness curve. I've let it rattle around in my brain for a bit before today, but in general I don't think that there's a good way to use that for what you want here. The best softness curve is usually linear (which is probably why that's the default). I'd be interested if someone jumped in with a good use case for the softness curve though!
I'm just going to mention this here. The free version of Cryengine sdk has a relatively good road tool. Trynelgren's new road was actually created with it. Cryengine doesn't support png heightmaps, but something like Imagemagick Display can easily convert an image from a 16bit png to a pgm, a type of file that cryengine can use for a terrain, and vise versa.
