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Roads & paths - is there an easy tool for doing this with height maps

rampart_1576840087rampart_1576840087 Posts: 504
edited June 2015 in The Commons

I watched the Mark Bremmer video on creating roads for Carrara with Photoshop and Illustrator.

"Roads on Terrain"

http://www.markbremmer.com/3Bpages/darkarts.html#

The method appears to work well enough, but it has alot of steps for producing roads on the terrain.

I get the Illustrator part to produce marked highways, etc..
I am looking to produce roads on terrain that are much simpler asphalt, gravel or just worn paths.

I have played with the height maps in photoshop, which require alot of trial and error.

There may be a image height map tool that will do what I need, which I've not found.

I have photoshop and illustrator, but I was hoping to leave off the illustrator part and just produce the height map with roads in photoshop or other tool.

Post edited by rampart_1576840087 on

Comments

  • WendyLuvsCatzWendyLuvsCatz Posts: 40,063
    edited December 1969

    oh if only we could access the old forum
    yes there is using terrain layers in texture room too but I do not know how

  • rampart_1576840087rampart_1576840087 Posts: 504
    edited December 1969

    http://www.shapemagic.com/roadmaker/

    I just found this.

    Guess it is worth a try

  • RGcincyRGcincy Posts: 2,862
    edited December 1969

    I'm the author of Roadmaker. Here's an image of a road I made tonight rendered in Bryce and then exported and rendered in Daz Studio as well. The output is a little crude - especially the road texture. You can also get stair stepping when the terrain map is imported back into Bryce. I'm slowly working on a version that outputs a mesh as you get much better quality.

    Rich.

    demo003_DazStudio.jpg
    1200 x 900 - 365K
    demo003_bryce.jpg
    718 x 598 - 57K
  • rampart_1576840087rampart_1576840087 Posts: 504
    edited June 2015

    Keep it up what I see looks good. The top picture will work now for many like myself (video productions) because the focus for these types of shots will mostly be on the vehicles or action taking place on the roads. When I need close ups I generally use high quality backgrounds and foreground props.

    It so tedious placing road props into landscape scenes where you are showing more than just a few frames.
    Aerial shots require so much work.

    You mention Bryce... I would think you need a tool that will work with the height maps
    Not proprietary to any application as possible.
    The future of Bryce is not positive from what I have read, even though it is a terrific application.

    If you can find a way to build the application to work as plugin or standalone for all height maps with hooks to other software should provide you with a long life product.

    Post edited by rampart_1576840087 on
  • RGcincyRGcincy Posts: 2,862
    edited December 1969

    Roadmaker uses height maps that can come from Bryce but also from any other software that creates them.

    I have Carrara 8.5 but almost never use it. I spent some time today figuring out how to import the road, texture and alpha maps and assemble them. This still has some road waviness - I need to see if any smoothing can be done.

    demo003_carrara.jpg
    800 x 600 - 73K
  • TangoAlphaTangoAlpha Posts: 4,587
    edited December 1969

    I've done similar things to Mark - at least I think so. For me that video has no sound, so I have no idea what he's saying. But I've ended up converting the terrain to a mesh and manipulating polys by hand. It's a slow, tedious process, but it gets results. I don't have Illustrator to make custom road surfaces, but to date all my roads have been dirt tracks, so it hasn't been an issue.

  • WendyLuvsCatzWendyLuvsCatz Posts: 40,063
    edited June 2015

    nm

    Post edited by WendyLuvsCatz on
  • WendyLuvsCatzWendyLuvsCatz Posts: 40,063
    edited June 2015

    nm

    Post edited by WendyLuvsCatz on
  • RGcincyRGcincy Posts: 2,862
    edited December 1969

    Played around in Carrara a bit more. This is better road scene than what I posted last night. Here's the basic approach I took:

    1. Created a terrain in Carrara.
    2. Exported the height map.
    3. Opened map in Roadmaker.
    4. Added road.
    5. Exported road, alpha and texture maps from Roadmaker. Road map is .bmp, others are .jpg.
    6. IMPORTANT STEP: Opened road map in GIMP, saved as .tif. This is need to avoid stair-stepping. In future update of Roadmaker, I'll see if I can save that map as .tif
    7. Replaced original height map in Carrara with modified height map containing road.
    8. Made a copy of the terrain. Scaled the Y-axis so it was a steeper terrain.
    9. After selecting the copy, went into texture room and made top shader Multi-channel.
    10. Made color and alpha channels Texture Map.
    11. Imported Roadmaker texture map into color channel.
    12. Imported Roadmaker alpha map into alpha channel. Checked box "invert color. This makes all of the second terrain disappear accept for the road bed which has the texture on it.
    13. Selected the original terrain, inserted a Surface Replicator.
    14. Added two tree models and dragged them under the Surface Replicator in the Scene tree.
    15. Selected the Surface Replicator, clicked on the Edit Shader button in top box.
    16. Make Top Shader Multi Channel. Made Color channel Texture Map. Imported Roadmker alpha map into color channel. This was done so when the trees are duplicated, they are not put on the road.
    17. Went into Model room and add about 300 trees.
    18. Added Humvee object, scale and positions.
    19. Added sunlight.

    Thank goodness for Google! I knew none of this yesterday but pieced it together from videos and forum posts I found. The road texture is crude because of the resolution of the jpg. so it works best for distant scenes.

    Rich

    demo004a_with_car.jpg
    800 x 600 - 526K
  • rampart_1576840087rampart_1576840087 Posts: 504
    edited December 1969

    I would appreciate to read more about the roadmaker.

    Roads and paths, caves and overhangs applied to terrain is always a problem.

    The link above returns a connection error.

  • rampart_1576840087rampart_1576840087 Posts: 504
    edited June 2015

    The shapemagic.com link is working now.

    Post edited by rampart_1576840087 on
  • RGcincyRGcincy Posts: 2,862
    edited December 1969

    Must have been a momentary blip in the server.

    Here are some direct links to the Roadmaker content:

    Overview: http://www.shapemagic.com/roadmaker/

    Help File (with step by step instructions): http://www.shapemagic.com/roadmaker/roadmaker help/roadmaker_help.htm

  • TangoAlphaTangoAlpha Posts: 4,587
    edited December 1969

    Looks interesting, but it's Windows only, so I'm out.

  • RGcincyRGcincy Posts: 2,862
    edited December 1969

    I've slowly been working on a mesh approach to making roads in terrains. It still starts with a height map but then does all the output as an .obj file with UV-mapped material zones. The example image shows the roadbed, curb, shoulder and adjacent terrain with cut-and-fill (you can tell where by the shadows). The mesh allows for much crisper lines on the road and edges (too crisp but I can eventually adjust for this by adding in some randomness). There's still a bunch of flaws in how the terrain flows and a problem I need to solve in marrying the road to the rest of the terrain but I think it shows promise. I also hope to have two additional material zones, one for cut and one for fill, so they can be differentiated from the rest of the terrain. Plus auto-generated telephone poles, road-side barriers, etc.

    Roadmaker_demo005.jpg
    1000 x 667 - 350K
  • rampart_1576840087rampart_1576840087 Posts: 504
    edited December 1969

    Wow, looks very good.

  • RGcincyRGcincy Posts: 2,862
    edited July 2015

    Did some more coding and testing and I can make separate material zones for cut and fill as shown in the image (rendered in Daz Studio). This is far from perfect right now as the blending between the cut/fill and terrain is not right but it shows what is possible.

    Roadmaker_demo006.jpg
    1000 x 667 - 618K
    Post edited by RGcincy on
  • RGcincyRGcincy Posts: 2,862
    edited December 1969

    Made some progress merging the road mesh with the full terrain. You can still see the seam - I need to add some code to smooth the junction. This also shows a better example of separate cut and fill textures. The cuts merge nicely with the terrain, the fill needs some work as its too blocky. Overall I think progress is being made.

    ShapeMagic_demo008a.jpg
    1000 x 750 - 714K
    ShapeMagic_demo008.jpg
    1000 x 750 - 631K
  • rampart_1576840087rampart_1576840087 Posts: 504
    edited July 2015

    Looking better with every improvement you make. .

    Post edited by rampart_1576840087 on
  • rampart_1576840087rampart_1576840087 Posts: 504
    RGcincy said:

    Made some progress merging the road mesh with the full terrain. You can still see the seam - I need to add some code to smooth the junction. This also shows a better example of separate cut and fill textures. The cuts merge nicely with the terrain, the fill needs some work as its too blocky. Overall I think progress is being made.

     

    I  am still dropping by, and watching this thread.  I am very interested to use this application. 

    I  haven't tried it lately, been so busy.  Don't get discouraged roads are a pain to produce on terrains using image masks and height maps.

    Here is link to the Mark Bremmer tutorial.. http://www.markbremmer.com/3Bpages/DAS07Road.html

     

  • RGcincyRGcincy Posts: 2,862

    I think I may have figured out the math to stitch the road mesh to the terrain so it will be smooth. I have to code it to see if it works as I envision. I'll post an image when I get to that point.

  • rampart_1576840087rampart_1576840087 Posts: 504

    Excellent, I'll be watching the thread.

     

     

  • RGcincyRGcincy Posts: 2,862
    edited July 2015

    Looking better. The stitiching code helps. It's not perfect yet as under some lighting conditions parts of the seam show but much better than before. I need to do some work on the main terrain, as it catches light differently than the cut and fill terrain.

    ShapeMagic_demo009.jpg
    1000 x 750 - 803K
    Post edited by RGcincy on
  • RGcincyRGcincy Posts: 2,862
    edited September 2015

    It's been a while since I've had a chance to work on this. The recent images were rendered in Daz Studio as I was having texture tiling problems with the roadbed in Bryce and Carrara. I tried something new today and it's working better. The process is to:

    1. export a terrain map from Bryce,
    2. add a road to it in roadmaker (where roadmaker creates the road, curb, shoulder, and does cut-and-fill),
    3. save it all as a mesh (not available in current version of roadmaker),
    4. import as an .obj file into Bryce and
    5. add textures.
    testroad_Bryce.jpg
    1514 x 568 - 165K
    Post edited by RGcincy on
  • RGcincyRGcincy Posts: 2,862
    edited September 2015

    Here's the image a bit bigger

    Post edited by RGcincy on
  • rampart_1576840087rampart_1576840087 Posts: 504

    The file for ShapeMagic2 doesn't mention roads, which file should I download?

  • RGcincyRGcincy Posts: 2,862
    edited September 2015

    Sorry, I was out of town for a few days. Here's the link to the roadmaker page with downoad info: http://www.shapemagic.com/roadmaker/

    I added it to my signature line as well.

    Post edited by RGcincy on
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