Hi there, I see that my topic has been discussed before, but it seems like nothing really got resolved with the issue on road intersections. My main focus is to make it easier and faster to build a 3D town, which means I plan on using Maya Python scripting. My thoughts where to build a script that basically automatically builds the streets the same way as if a human would do it himself. For example, extruding a road path and merging it onto the terrain ect.
I have watched several video tutorials and methods on how to make a single road contour over a terrain, but as I expressed it in bold, this is for a single road and not roads that intersect each other. In addition, this needs to be a dynamic concept since each step needs to comply with Maya’s python scripting capabilites. For example, if one of the steps requires to use booleans, then this would be usless because the python script would not know which faces/edges/vertices to delete after the cleanup. I also tried using UnityTerrains tool, but it makes extream sharp slopes in the terrain when one side of the road is higher then the other side. This fine when you are trying to map roads over a mountain, but it looks really unreallistic when a steep slope lies next to a house.
The other problem is that I am not in school anymore, so that means I cannot get student discounts on these extreamly expensive software such as Autodesk Revit Architecture; an arcitecture software that has street modeling capabilities.
Are there any other solutions?
First of all: I can’t help you with anything related to Maya and Python scripting.
All I can tell you that I spend days searching for ways to relatively easily build roads with intersection and I came to the conclusion that you won’t find it. All those procedural tools do not create realistic streets, especially with correct lines etc. Forget about getting for example CityEngine and trying to optimize the mesh afterwards, I wasted weeks on this procedure!!
You should think about the efficiency of programming a script for your needs. In the end you may spend the same amount of time on the script you also would have needed to model it manually.
I use 3ds max (fortunately I am a student) and Railclone from iToo Software to create a realistic road network. Though there is a lot of manual work to do, but imo it’s worth it, because it looks great and you have all possibilities you can imagine.
Another simpler way would be to build modular parts and using the Unity grid placement to combine them. But I don’t like that personally.
I hope I could help you at least a bit.
Thanks for the info Rattlehead. I also wonder if by keeping the terrain data and the road map as seperate layers along with setting the road’s blending mode as ADD in Photoshop? Seems kind of odd that this would not work. Other than that, I guess my only solution is to keep my terrain flat, and use BlendedCities for Blender 2.49.
So I take it that since I have not recieved any other solutions, my guest is keeping the terrain and road maps seperate in photoshop would not solve the problem? If so, I guess I will have to use BlendedCities script for Blender 2.49 instead, which I really would like to hold back from since it does not support terrain height.