Making Roads

#1 I've seen this question several times on the forums, but I'm unsure if a really good answer has been attained.

Here is something that might just help you out.. www.garagegames.com/blogs/44513/12278

Although I have heard talk of building roads in .dif format. It is something I'm actually quite interested in myself. To build a flat road with no banking would be quite easy to do in .dif. The banks would make it a more intense task.

I might try to build a simple .dif track just to see how well it would work.

I'll keep you posted if I make any headway.

Good Luck!

#2 Thanks I saw that blog when I did a search. I don't really understand what he's talking about with the whole terrain size thing. Is he referring to using the terrain painting feature?

#3 Yes, using a "road" texture to do so. I'm not sure how much work is involved in that, but it looks pretty spiffy!

btw, I just started a road in .dif, I'll send ya the results when I finish it. It may be a day or so though.

#4 Thanks for the feedback Brian. I'm looking forward to seeing it. I'll tinker with painting a road, which I believe will take some time.

#5 Here is a link I came across last year with some good road ideas.
www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=40444

Here's a picture of a dif road I made that looks ok.
www.PacificCoastTravels.com/Island-2.jpg
(it's a link because it's kind of big for this forum window)
I should have used a sand texture instead of rusty metal.
I have a straight piece and a 22 degree bend piece
and between the two of them I could go pretty much anywhere.
Tapering the sides lets it fit better on tilted terrain.

#6 @Frank- I worked on a .dif track last night to see how hard it would be. Turns out, it wasn't that hard, and it looks quite nice in CShop. On export however, something is happening to the file.

Here is a pic of the track in cshop:


Here is a pic in Torque after export:


I'm not sure what is going on, but if anyone has any ideas, please let me know.


If I can get this corrected, it shouldn't be too hard to accomplish what is needed for a nice road course.

#7 You can make DIF's even more flat, then by using the alpha channel thing on the edges of the road, and with some clever placement Ive had good results in the past, give it a try:)

#8 Nice work Brian. My next logical question would be about "banking" the road and creating dips, etc. It seems that the terrain editor would do a better job of banking and such, but I guess there is a trade-off. By trade off I mean, you can spend time creating sections with diff and carefully place them, or you can paint a road with terrain editor. Both take time. Now the challenge comes in when you want to model a real track like in GTR, GT-Legends, and rfactor. I believe they take a topoligical survey of the real tracks and use the coordinates to overlay (not sure that's the right terminology) the graphics. I've also seen converters that take those tracks and convert them from one to the other. Another good example is http://motorsport-sim.org/. They have an open-source project going and it looks like they have their tracks laid out with coordinates, and then they somehow model the track from the coordinates. I'm not really sure though how the commercial outfits are doing it. $$$ I guess.

#9 Using the terrain to build the track would make more sense, not only would it cut down on cpu usage, but you would also end up with a smoother track. TGEA may be more suited for such things though.

#10 search for fxroad