So yeah, everyone knows how the edges of MESH roads, unlike surface-applied decal roads, must be manually worked into the terrain, with much, much effort on your part. That's a real pain, especially if you have rather smallish grid squares, or obtusely LARGE ones on a HUUUUGE map to the point where it's near impossible to mesh the road in without getting gobs of clipping/flickering etc. Nevermind this obscenely-almost-too-large-for-Beam 12mi x 12mi map (144sq mi!) of REAL Tennessee I'm working on. Let's focus on the problem(s) of those pesty-but-necessary mesh roads. So here's an idea. I've got some textures I'm working on, complete with normal and specular maps in addition to the normal diffuse. Let's integrate the grass with the road, seriously. It'll have asphalt traction a bit on the grassy edges of the road, but that's a way better trade off than a car-shattering encounter with the edge of the road. Not seen this idea in Beam yet, but seeing as mesh roads must be rectangular for the lack of tapered edges (which would be WONDERFUL, HINT HINT)... this is the best stop-gap solution. Going to be using this in my up-and-coming map along with some other innovative ideas, which I'll post more of later. So for some in-dev map pics of the proof-of-concept here: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=636888071 http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=636888266 The leading edge of the road, shown in orange, obviously this won't be part of the final map: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=636887517 The catch? You'll have traction like asphalt on the grass that's part of the road, but if you do it right, you'll bury most of the grass bordering the road with real terrain, I just stuck the roadway in a pre-existing valley as a demo here on the edge of my humongous map. So yea just a pre-view of the map itself, the huge monster map, re-creating route 40 in middle-to-east Tennessee because it's just so awesome to drive on IRL, I am going to be making it here http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=636896064 Oh, and I used a super-skinny mesh-road as jersey barrier for the highway, too. It's super-useful for saving on objects, and doesn't quite have the car-flipping effect of real k-rail center dividers on highways. YES, the highway is super-speed friendly on hills No car-eating bumps, etc. The last dozen or so pics from Beam in my steam profile are of THAT map, so if you're as curious as a still-living cat, then feel free to peruse them. The end of car-eating mesh roads is near! Other innovative map ideas shall follow this post I am more tricks up my sleeve. By the way, ETA on this map is a good month or more away, possibly two. I don't like releasing super-early works. I will also upload this texture, if anyone's interested. I'd like to de-glossify it a bit (specular map is a bit too eager here but I needed something!) first but it'll definitely be shared (along with a few other road textures).
So if I understood correctly, you made an extra-wide mesh "road" with both the road and a bit of grass? Great idea! That map is looking EPIC, cannot wait! Also, a little noob question I wasn't yet bothered to open a thread about, if you could help me: How can I import new road textures? And: Do I also need the normal, specular and diffuse maps for it? (I'm a newbie with textures)
You use a decorative wall and a standard mesh road, burying a bit of your mesh road into the high side of the road, and using a nice stone wall or gaurd-rail on the low side. Generally roads right next to cliffs are done by manually editing the terrain using the flatten icon. You can always use the square leveling tool (not the set height tool), if you're running at one of the 8 angles to the grid. Start out with a nice smooth slope that doesn't deviate a lot in it's hill, e.g. a nice smooth incline but not smooth enough for a road. Using flatten tool, set your square tool size to just a tad bigger than the roadway, and VIEW WIREFRAME (visibility) and go one grid unit at a time up the hill where you want the road, keeping in a straight line (otherwise it won't be smooth). Use the vertex grabber with a tool size of one to get perfection with wireframe mode when working with the landscape. This 'hackey' solution is for specific maps and specific areas, it's not a one-size fits-all cure-all type of thing, and it won't work with every scenario. Be aware doing this @ a 45 degree angle to the map grid with LARGE square size of 2 or more (in terrain options), as the way collision is worked in Torque3d/Beamng.drive, you'll end up with a car-killer road especially going up a steep hill. This solution that I've come up with is only worth it when you have hills on both sides of the roadway, even small inclines will do. The real pros export their map to Blender and the like, but I am not quite so proficient with that one, and would prefer to do it this way. --- Post updated --- You need to create your textures that you wish to import, they should be square or rectangular, and the road should be oriented vertically in the texture. The part you see is called a diffuse. The part that shows relief (bump mapping, 3d dimensional look) is a blue-ish tinted version of the picture is called the NORMAL. The reflective (black and white) version of the picture is called the SPECULAR image. Look at the game textures for an idea of what you can do. *Diffuse textures are the main roadway image that you'll be seeing the most of in-game. The color of your pavement, etc, is all done here. Make this look good and try not to copy-paste too much when making roads. Make sure it tiles well, too. *Normal maps are blue as said above, they give the texture a bit of 3d look to it (video settings permitting), and help it not look so flat. This is a good place to accent the road striping, cracks, pavement edges, etc. Look at the game pics for reference. *Too much difference in the specular map will give you a super-shiney roadway that looks like it is wet. Good for rainy maps but little else, as we don't have polished super-shiny roads for certain reasons IRL. Lighter colors are more reflective IIRC. THESE THREE TEXTURES MUST BE THE SAME SIZE. For performance reasons, you'll have to keep them within powers of 2, and generally it's a good idea to do 1024x2048 or if you're on a low-end pc, 512x1024. In-game settings for a 1024x2048 road texture that takes up most of the image, would be like a length of 20 or so (on your mesh or decal road settings). You can obviously set this to your liking. Mesh or decal road with for a standard two-lane roadway would leave your at just over 1.5 car widths per-lane, or about 9.5 feet (11.5 or 12ft on highways). A car is roughly 6ft wide. That's about a setting from 8.5 to 9 in width for surface streets, or 10-12 for highways (I had to use 12 because my highways are essentially 3 lanes due to the wide shoulder, as pictured). Transparency - ah our wonderful *cough* justice system OOPS I mean, transparency is what you'll use if you're using mesh roads, you'll want to shut this off, otherwise shadows will be reflected on the ground underneath the roadway. You can do so in your materials file, or in the editor under material editing properties. This is a global per-map setting. You'll want to keep a copy that's transparent for your DECAL roads, and a copy for your mesh roads that's NOT transparent. 1 for yes, 0 for no. Your materials file is located in your textures folder(s), and usually references just those textures in that folder. So go and get Notepad++ (it's free, open-source, and does not come bundled with adware if you download it from the correct official site), and use it to work with your materials configuration file (materials.cs). MAKE SURE YOUR TEXTURES (normal and specular) are ALL THE SAME SIZE as the diffuse or you'll crash upon opening the texture in the editor. Just for reference, the diffuse is sometimes called the color map. If anyone has any corrections here... just chime in and I'll fix what's in here. Credit goes to Ouerbacker for letting me know about the powers*2 texture size requirement for performance reasons. It's not much, until you get to huuuuge textures. I am dealing with an R7 265/7850 2gb radeon card, that's several years old, so I have to keep an eye on things to keep this playable. And for the record, you don't NEED normal or specular maps, but they'll make the texture look a lot less flat. To recap: Diffuse/color map (use one or the other), is the part you see most of. (required!) Specular is reflections (from the sun, or from headlights). This one's black and white. Normal map is bump-mapping, essentially, makes it look less flat (it's not the 1990s anymore you know). This works wonders with brick or stone walls/roads too. This one is mostly cyan/blue with sometimes a bit of pink. Materials.cs is a plain-text file with the texture names etc. Copy a section and put in your own texture names, and name it something different like below where I have it bolded: singleton Material (roadname) Each texture must have a unique name, but they can share diffuse/color, normals & specular maps if you wish. Make sure the brackets stay where they are in the config file! That marks the beginning and end of where the game is looking for the pointers to your texture data. Keep in mind you can have a complete copy of one texture, with a different name, with just transparency set differently for making your mesh and decal roads match up. As always, make a backup if you are going into uncharted territory, incase you bungle something up a bit. You can always download my NEVADA INTERSTATE map and take a look into the folders to find the ROADS texture folder, and see how I did things there. Theres plenty of textures you can freely use, also. It has most of the textures that my current map does, less the actual road-with-grass texture(s).
I would love to be able to use my own meshes as the mesh road. Just create a tilable road piece in blender and import it into BeamNg and load the mesh to the mesh road. Most of the time, just a rectangular mesh road isn't going to do the trick. A feature like this will be so freaking useful. VERY USEFUL!
You most certainly can create something in SKETCH-UP tool and duplicate it as needed. There is a 4096 object hard-limit, per map, in BeamNG.Drive. That means 4096 objects total (mesh roads, decals & decal roads, prefabs/objects, etc). It's pretty easy to not hit that unless building a city of sorts/urbanized area. Just make sure to line up those edges PERFECTLY otherwise if the car hits it the wrong way, BOOOOM.
It could be kind of handled like the forest object. The road is made as all one object like the foilage in the forest object. The mesh road is just an array of polygons connected triggered and bend along a spline. You actually can kind of do this in blender and automatically update it in Torque 3D. You could make a spline curve. Then create a tilable textured road. Put the array (tweak it to duplicate the right direction. Also enable Merge) then add a curve modifier and select your spline. Now bend and extrude the spline and your road will follow. If you run out of road, select the road and increase the count in the array modifier. Now export to dae or whatever Torque 3D accepts and select only the mesh to be exported and select apply all modifiers. Save it into your shapes folder in your map. Also save your textures. Now, you should be able to make an instance of your road in the world editor by dragging your road from the shadows folder into the map. Idk if the materials would already be created, but if not, create a material and assign you texture. Now put your material onto your road. Your road may be too large or too small. The first thing you would try to do is resizing it. Don't do that. You would have to resize every road you create and it could lead to inconsistent road scale. Also editing the mesh in blender and exporting again will probably mess things up. To scale to the correct size, go into blender and resize your road. Make sure you select both the spline and road. Then press S and scale it. Now export it and replace the original 3D file. Torque 3D should update the mesh. Repeat this process until you're happy with its scale. Now if you want to edit your road, like add more road or add a turn, you can do so. After the edit, just export and replace the original exported 3D file. It should update in Torque 3D/BeamNG. The advantages with this method is that you have a lot of control with the road. You can do what ever you want with it. You could also add lod by applying both array and curve modifiers and split into multiple objects. The disadvantages is that its difficult to know where the terrain is. So you would have to try to figure out with trial and error where the road should be on the terrain. I think you could export the terrain as a mesh from T3D and import into blender and add the road on top of that. I don't know if you can, I haven't looked. You also don't have fully real time feedback. In order to see changes, you have to export constantly. You can't have different friction behaviors either. They will all act like concrete and you can't add grass to it.
