SENTIERI - [BETA 0.5] - Terrain Procedural Path Creator for Roads, Rivers and more

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Hello guys,
just started to build a new tool : SENTIERI
It will allow the creation of track for roads and rivers. It is fully integrated with GAIA for terrain creation. Asset has even an internal system to build road and river and other.

Workflow allow you to just put on the terrain at least two points of interest that you would connect with a route. Tool seeks for the smooth track between those points considering the slopness and the distance. It works even in runtime where you can setup your POI to connect. That’s very usefull in case you have procedural terrain created at run time.

As mentioned above, you do not need to draw your track, just the point of interest on your terrain you would connect with road or you would see a river inside. System will create the full route by itself.

Goal is to have a really easy to use tool, but with AAA quality.

You can watch the proof of concept that has driven the project startup
In the proof of concept, terrain was created with GAIA , the path for the track was created with SENTIERI.

More details in the Trello board :

My goal is to give my small contribute, coming from my 20 years professional experience in IT, to Unity world. To do that stay in touch with community is really crucial. So, I have created a DIscord channel and I hope you can join me there

Your feedback is really appreciated to enhance the tool with the most friendly feature and the best realism.

EDIT
I am happy about the progress … Since the time I wrote this post, a lot of progress. SENTIERI is going to be more than the original plan. It will alow to create a procedural journey in your world …soon I will launch the Beta program. I hope you will join that

Cheers,
Antonio

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I thought it was cool how the terrain was adjusted to help fit the road!

I think that looks really good and will be a huge time saver.

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As previously mentioned, would it be possible to build junctions?
A few more suggestions:

  • ability to work in the editor
  • options to tweak the width of the road, from 6 lanes highways to a small walking path in a forest. In meters will be better, me thinks.
  • options to change the textures on the road after the built is done, or in the preview?
  • I noticed in the video the road was hot perfectly horizontal oriented. maybe having an option or percentage based to how much to follow the slope would be useful, with a bit of noise added, more or less, to have different behaviors on the road. lets say on a coastal area will be following the slope more than compared to the inland hills.
  • the ability to work on meshes too, not only on terrains
  • use projection maps to mask the terrain in case you don’t want having road in certain areas, or to break/crack the road/asphalt in places, or even to apply different textures, like on the side of the road, in the middle, on bridges, if that would be possible.
  • if the tool works on meshes too, the ability to export the new mesh for the road only as being added on top, or export hte entire mesh terrain.
    If you need beta testers, I’m more than willing to help. :slight_smile:
    Thanks!
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Hi Mark,
thanks for coming up with those points. All are valid one.
I am going to create a Trello project and share that. I have my view on the topic, but getting feedback from users is crucial to create a valid tool that can bring benefit in everyboday gaming workflow.
New videos will come to show the progress and get feedback.

In the meanwhile, please find below my answer. I hope are what you expected.

You can already do those.

In the video I have used a thirdy part asset to generate the mesh of the road.
So far the tool compatible with other asset that are more specific to “build” the road. But one point of the plan is to embed few components to build the roads, not only to generate the track. In any case, you can post-process whatever tool you used.

I do not see challenge according to the algorithm I developed, so I am going to include in the TODO List. You will find in Trello project that point.

That’s a good point. I can do. My idea is to do directly in the editor … I wanna give a really smart and friendly tool …

Yes, I can build that feature.

Yes, I will count on you when I kick off beta stage. Thanks a lot

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do you calculate and create waypoints and then use another asset to create roads? such as easyroads?

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Looking forward to this! Especially if it is really user friendly! Love the look of what you’ve posted here and in the Gaia thread!

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No worries. :slight_smile:
Your concept/early stage presentation is really attractive.
One other idea it might be to add a bit of noise, masked or not in certain areas, to make the road less straight or add a bit of variation to the smooth line or curves that guide the road.
Also, maybe having options to the control points to switch from a 2 lane asphalt road to single lane/way road, or even to a forest walking path.

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You can even use an external tool as EasyRoad. But I am building a small road builder. I would give a out of box solution, but open.

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Yeah … your “noise idea is nice” … I have already incorporated … thanks …

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Thanks a lot …
Please feel free to give your suggestion …

Cheers,
Antonio

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Just another thumbs up to this project. Plotting the best path for a road, based on slope and other terrain factors, is basically what surveyors do in the real world. It produces more realistic results, taking the terrain into account, than I’d probably get on my own. You mentioned using a third party asset (easy roads? Pro or free?) to make the actual roads, but even if all you do is lay down dirt paths from one POI to another, it still represents a significant time saving over doing it by hand. I’m not sure where you plan to go with this, but I’m certainly interested in any product that gets released. :slight_smile:

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Hi
thanks for your feedback. I am in line with you. Primary goal is the creation of the best track on huge terrain. Road building is something on the requirement list, but just to release a full working package that it does not have any contrain from thirdy party tool.
In anycase package will be fully comptible with EasyRoad Pro ( I do not know if the free version as well becuase there are license contrain ) and other asset that community would like to have.

In the next few days I will record another video showing the Edit features … and hopefully next week the full plan so commnuniy can interact checking all the features, voting to some point so it will be help me to prioritize the development, propose new features and check the progress …I hope that it’s gonna be a collaborative team work… Thanks.

Cheers,
Antonio

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I would say 98% of my work will always be fantasy/medieval type worlds. So I’m just looking for a good source to create dirt/stone roads and paths (possibly rivers and streams) that has a UI that is simple enough that I can use. I own some other road assets that sound simple enough but I just can’t get my head wrapped around them because the user interface is overly complicated. A simple way to designate start and end points along with a few “along the way” points and then have a script that would look at things from the terrain height under those points to determine the best path to next point and provide a flat width in the terrain along that path would be totally awesome. Maybe have a setting where we can set width. Obviously a path will be more narrow than a single lane road which in turn is more narrow than a two lane lane road, etc…

Anything more than that maybe separate in the UI into an advanced tab. That way those of us just looking for simple roads wont get overwhelmed by a bunch of settings that aren’t necessary to us but having in advanced tab will still make them available to those needing more complex road options…

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Hi antoripa,

I only just saw you started your own thread related to this. Nice work, this video actually does use the EasyRoads3D API, including terrain flattening and tree removal, right? :wink:

I like the idea of releasing this, it is currently not on our list to implement.

Raoul

[Edit] Thank you for updating the introductory post now including that EasyRoads3D was used for what I already wrote above, I think it is fair to mention all that in your post given the thread title.

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Hi Raoul,
primary scope of the tool is create the path automatically on terrain just putting start and destination. Here is even an algorithm to blend/shape the terrain becuase need to take care of the overall path, not only local path. Maybe I will include a really basic road generator to not create contrain and release a working package. But I would be happy to build a full compatible tool with an amazing and advanced tool like EasyRoad3D.
At the moment there are few challenges I have been approaching in “Edit Mode” trying to use ER3Dbeta to build the road, but I am quite sure to achieve that points, even with your supports. Thanks.
Cheers,
Antonio

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Hi Antonio,

Yes, it seems you have worked out the path finding really well!

Since the actual road creation and terrain adjustments in the video is done using EasyRoads3D, I thought I jump in, I hope you don’t mind :slight_smile:

Thanks,
Raoul

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You are welcome …If it’s fine to you I would officially add one more point to my plan : 100% Working with EasyRoad3D …

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Hi guys …
just pushed a new video …It is not high quality video … but I wanna show you first features I created to work in Edit Mode and check your terrain and path… Just to explain where I am, terrain is 2Km X 2Km … please feel free to share with me your feedback ( whatever is ) and your suggestion … In the video, in the last part I generate the road elements with EasyRoad3D Pro…It’s a “terrain road style”… in play mode you will see some spere in the middle of road … I am using those to improve the blending and showing in the video to check that all is well aligned
… more and more in the next coming days …

Cheers,
Antonio

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Very nice. The green road preview in Edit mode is nice. Very useful.
There are 2 very sharp angles on the road at 2:15 and 3:05.
Shape and texture wise, the road blending with the terrain is very natural.
It might need a bit of touch to get rid of the very sharp edge where the vegetation was deleted.
I suppose the road width has nothing to do with the size of the terrain, lets say on a 8x8km terrain I mean if you set the path/road at 2m wide, it’ll be 2 m.
How an 4k or even an 8k heightmap change/shape the road compared with a 2k heightmap on a 2x2 km, considering there is way mode detail on an 8k map.
I would also want to see a demo/video on a geometry/mesh terrain.
Will it work an a tiled Unity terrain? Or even on a group/multi object mesh terrain?
I know you’re using another asset and my questions might touch both of them, but as an user, I see this as a single feature: building roads.
And talking about EasyRoad3D being used at this stage, I think it might be very useful for everyone (developers and users) to keep the symbiotic relation in the future, even if you come up with your own solution. Always better having more options.
Thanks for the video. Nice work!

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thanks to you …
In this stage I am focus on the path creation … I mean just put my POI on a map and let generate the smooth track according to the MaxSlope and to the short way between our point. And so far so good …So I am not really focus on sharp angle, but I am happy to hear that there are just two sharp angles…

About the terrain size, if you think locally your view is correct. 2meters are always to meeters … but if you think globally … I am connecting points that are hundreds meteers far … looking for the smart path … so in that case I have an impact on perfomance …my goal is to work on really huge terrains … I do not want to write down size becuase you could not believe me … so in the next few days … I will show you a new terrain for my demo video … picking up a real world zone …so you can fully count on multi tile terrains …:slight_smile:

Next step to implement is … …come on … I do not hear the Epic Suspenseful Action Music …