The Road Architect tool looks very promising. I'm sure everyone who creates roads would love to see this get more development focus. One thing I think would greatly improve it is to be able to assign a ground texture automatically under the road decals or even just under the mesh, with options to have solid or feathered edges and maybe even to add a min and max randomness/roughness to the feathering (for more natural blending). This would be a massive time saver and likely improve the look of roads. Also, I know we can select all nodes and raise or lower an entire road, but a built in "Terraform Rendering Height Offset" might be a nice addition. (I often like to lower the whole road before terraforming to give roads a raised bank)
And please let us use the procedural meshes like sidewalks after loading the map without entering world editor. Perhaps with a lua command for loading and rendering a road architect project after the map is loaded.
I haven't had the chance to use the Road Architect much since it released, but last I checked, BeamNG's terrain system doesn't allow smooth/feathered blending between material layers. Each terrain vertex can only have one material layer assigned to it, and the polygons between those vertices are what handle the transition.
The old non pbr terrain textures did blend quite well. With the pbr terrain it’s much harder to get decent results. The colors have to be desaturated and shouldn’t be too different between the terrains. I really would like to have an in-depth explanation from the devs how their best practice is.
Feathering would be great, but even an adjustable dithering width algorithm could make things looks more natural. This should kind of show what I mean... (assuming I can put a picture in here - haven't tried this yet)
Ruts tool... Another idea that might be cool for the Road Architect is the ability to add Ruts to road sections. Creators could select the min/max Depth & min/max "Wiggle" randomness (kind of like vehicles have slipped or slid around in for slower & deeper areas) and overall Width of Smoothing (so compact dirt roads might have a smooth hump through the center of the road or mud might have deeper more isolated ruts). The tool already allows terraforming so this might be a nice addition that wouldn't take too much work to implement.
Another addition to this tool that would be nice is a "Rumble-Strip Tool". I am still a bit new to this game but, I have not found an easy, or standard way to add rumble strips to road race tracks and while I assume this can be done with the "object to spline" tool or other methods, it would be nice to have this option right in the Road Architect since it should be the future tool for all roads and tracks.
