Best Way For Making Roads?

[mastar891]

Hello,

 

I recently started building a worldspace. I'm still new to regions and such and was able to utilize it for vegetation, but I'm having trouble making roads. I was wondering if there was a better way than just placing the object down, and trying to match it up with the previous model. Perhaps object clipping? Any help would be greatly appreciated. I looked all over the place for a tutorial or a tip, but nothing so far that was able to help me. Maybe I'm not looking hard enough?

 

Thank you.

[madmongo]

If you turn on the grid snap then the road pieces will match up with the previous piece fairly easily.

 

What I ended up doing was creating a few SCOLs to make my life a bit easier. I took straight pieces of road and broken pieces of road and mixed them in several different combinations, with each SCOL made up of 4 roadway pieces. That way I ended up only placing 1/4th as many things onto the landscape. If I was going to do it all over again I'd go into Blender and combine the pieces into single objects instead of using SCOLs.

 

I made longer sections of guardrail in Blender as well. Placing all of those individual pieces gets really tiresome very quickly.

 

When you navmesh your cells, make sure you check the box for heightmap generation mode. Otherwise it will totally hose up the navmesh generation over the SCOLs and broken road sections.

 

Use broken roads more than good roads. That way when you get to something that is difficult or just isn't working well, cover it with landscape so it looks like dirt blew over that section of road. You can hide an awful lot of mistakes and things that don't fit well together just by covering it all up with dirt.

 

If you look at the way Bethesda did it they tend to use small road chunks with lots of gaps and then paint the landscape around it with asphalt texture. That works, but it takes a lot of time and effort to make a long roadway that way. I had decent success using mostly broken road pieces in SCOLs to minimize the number of road pieces I had to lay down.

[mastar891]

If you turn on the grid snap then the road pieces will match up with the previous piece fairly easily.

 

What I ended up doing was creating a few SCOLs to make my life a bit easier. I took straight pieces of road and broken pieces of road and mixed them in several different combinations, with each SCOL made up of 4 roadway pieces. That way I ended up only placing 1/4th as many things onto the landscape. If I was going to do it all over again I'd go into Blender and combine the pieces into single objects instead of using SCOLs.

 

I made longer sections of guardrail in Blender as well. Placing all of those individual pieces gets really tiresome very quickly.

 

When you navmesh your cells, make sure you check the box for heightmap generation mode. Otherwise it will totally hose up the navmesh generation over the SCOLs and broken road sections.

 

Use broken roads more than good roads. That way when you get to something that is difficult or just isn't working well, cover it with landscape so it looks like dirt blew over that section of road. You can hide an awful lot of mistakes and things that don't fit well together just by covering it all up with dirt.

 

If you look at the way Bethesda did it they tend to use small road chunks with lots of gaps and then paint the landscape around it with asphalt texture. That works, but it takes a lot of time and effort to make a long roadway that way. I had decent success using mostly broken road pieces in SCOLs to minimize the number of road pieces I had to lay down.

Thanks for the info, it actually works out really well. For some odd reason I've had a lot of patience when placing roads, which is the least I can about other things I'm doing with GECK.