24 réponses à ce sujet

[Tonden_Ockay]

Has anyone made roads like this?

 

 

I like the idea of grass between the wheel tracks.

 

If no one has then I will look into making some.

[MerricksDad]

You thinking to do shorter clumps placed on the tile, or are you thinking to increase the polygon count on the main flat and fill it with grass spawning walkmesh? I'd go with placed clumps (carpet sized), unless your tileset has short grass.

[Proleric]

Placeable roads (as seen in CEP etc) are handy, as they can be placed without constraint, and don't peter out at bridges etc.

Of course, a grassy road would need to match the tile grass, but it could still usefully be a set of placeables.

[Zwerkules]

Placeable roads are only good for tilesets with completely flat terrain, which should have gone out of fashion years ago but sadly haven't and I fear they never will. Most single player module designers are stuck in the past and still think the CEP (and the tileset expansions in it) are the greatest thing since bread came sliced.

Those placable roads will also look wierd if grass is growing on them everywhere.

[s e n]

I did a similar crosser for the terria tileset

[MerricksDad]

Placeable roads are only good for tilesets with completely flat terrain, which should have gone out of fashion years ago but sadly haven't and I fear they never will. Most single player module designers are stuck in the past and still think the CEP (and the tileset expansions in it) are the greatest thing since bread came sliced.

Those placable roads will also look wierd if grass is growing on them everywhere.

Like this twice

[Proleric]

First thing I do is turn grass off.

More generally, though more modern tilesets look better in themselves, storytelling is much easier if the tileset is a relatively blank canvass for creatures and placeables. It's possible to waste a lot of time "fighting the tileset".

That said, sloping placeable roads would be a bonus.

[Pstemarie]

Best way to do what Tonden is asking would be to make an actual series of road tiles where the ruts/tracks were slightly depressed into the geometry of the ground and textured with a dirt, mud, or gravel texture. The walkmesh between the tiles can then be set to grass material, leaving the ruts/tracks as dirt material and the areas adjacent to the roads as grass material. In this manner you would get an appearance identical to the picture Tonden posted.

 

The ruts/tracks could be a simple V track cut into the ground mesh and detached as a separate object. This would create the desired effect, still be low poly, and not require any special modification to the Z height of the walkmesh to accommodate the V-shaped cutout tracks. If you want something more realistic for the ruts, use a low-poly U-shaped scallop - probably a 6 face semicircle would suffice.

 

In essence, the geometry is an inverse of what I did for the Q ploughed fields. The furrows on those tiles are actually low-poly triangular peaks whose tips are slightly higher than the surrounding ground.

 

[EDIT]

 

There is also an easier way I just thought of if you don't mind sacrificing the 3-D geometry of the above method, but it requires a little work lining up the texture with the walkmesh...

 

If you just want to change the material in the walkmesh, all of the road tiles have a wide swath of dirt material that corresponds to the location of the road texture on the tile. All you would need to do is reconstruct that section of the walkmesh, adding a strip down the middle of the track and setting the material of the newly created faces to "grass". The easiest way to do this would be to...

 

1. Select the faces of the dirt material on the walkmesh and delete them - you'll be left with two outer faces of "grass" with a void down the middle

 

2. Clone the outer vertices on each edge of the deleted track and slide them toward the middle, creating a narrow path down the middle of the track

 

3. Create new faces, filling in the middle of the empty void created when you deleted the original dirt material faces from the object - you'll now have two strips of grass faces on the left and right, a thin void (where the track will go) on the left and right, and then a thinner strip of grass faces in the middle of the two thinner voids

 

4. Select the newly created faces and set the material to "grass"

 

5. Create new faces, one on each side of the newly created strip of grass faces.

 

6. Select the faces of each thinner strip and set the material to dirt (or stone if you prefer)

 

The walkmesh will look something like this when you are done...

 

 

[/EDIT]

[Tonden_Ockay]

I would love to have the ruts in the ground however as you all may know by now I'm still learning and have really just been working with textures. So that said I have started working on a retextured road that is like Pstemarie 2nd idea. I will post a screenshot when I have something to show. i just wanted to check to see if anyone had made any kind of road like this before I used my time to work on something.

 

I'm helping coach my older sons football team, coaching my younger two sons flag football team, and my two daughters are in cheerleading. So finding time to work on NWN has been hard since all that has started up.

[Michael DarkAngel]

How about something like this...

So far, it's only one tile and I haven't tested it in-game yet to see what it looks like.

 

Are the ruts too far apart?

Are they too skinny?

Are they deep enough?

 

I would probably use this as a replacement for the current rural roads.

 

MDA

[T0r0]

Grab the caravan models and use that to determine wheel width of the the tracks and ruts...
Also LOW had a wagon that actually travelled, so it's good to use assets already available. IMHO

Looks great !

Also the obvious point of note is that you need to change every model vs just handful of tga

[Tarot Redhand]

Personally I wish someone would make some really muddy roads as all of the tilesets I can remember seem to have bone dry ones.

 

TR

[3RavensMore]

I just measured an old, old wagon--the horse drawn kind folks.  The track width was 4' 6". 

[Tonden_Ockay]

It look pretty good to me.

 

The only thing I see is the lines dividing the dirt and grass are really crisp/clear/straight (to perfect). 

[Pstemarie]

It look pretty good to me.

 

The only thing I see is the lines dividing the dirt and grass are really crisp/clear/straight (to perfect). 

 

Yup, need to increase the poly count slightly and then drag some verts around to vary the width of the tracks.

[kalbaern]

I like the premise of this project, however ... I think what has been envisioned and demonstrated is more like a modern day tractor, truck or ATV trail and not wagons or carts. Unless its meant to represent trails that are very seldom used. Trails or roads created by wagon and cart traffic would actually have fairly wide rut grooves due to each passer actually avoiding riding directly in the deepest ruts left by predecessors. Very little plant growth would survive in the center of such trails either as animal hooves and foot traffic flatten it constantly. Aside from their flatness, the dirt roads in OC tilesets and the matching CEP placeable versions aren't actually far of the mark and really only lack wider grooves and some random meandering of the tracks. I think using many of the various placeable grass and thicket patches found in the CEP or elsewhere could help mimic lesser traveled wagon and cart paths. "Zwerkules" recently released some nice vegetation that I'll be using for this very purpose.

[Michael DarkAngel]

It look pretty good to me.

 

The only thing I see is the lines dividing the dirt and grass are really crisp/clear/straight (to perfect). 

 

 

Yup, need to increase the poly count slightly and then drag some verts around to vary the width of the tracks.

 

I think the poly count is high enough, considering I practically doubled the poly-count for the entire tile.  Not saying that it couldn't go higher, but I didn't want to go crazy with the tesselate modifier.  However, I did add some noise to hopefully make it not look too perfect, and I adjusted the grassrim (you can't really see it in the screenshot above from NWExplorer),  Below is a couple screenshots in-game with three tiles completed.

 

Click for larger view

 

Click for larger view

 

MDA

[Pstemarie]

The bottom screenshot looks good, but IMO the track still looks a little too uniform. Kalbaern's observation is correct, even on a seldom used road or trail, wagon ruts would be much wider and tend to overlap quite often. The trick is really going to be with the texture for the tracks - making it look like several overlapping tracks without having to actually model several depressions. The best result would be doing what MDA did, but with a wider track and a vertice count that allows the depth and width of the track to be varied across the tile. Right now it looks a little too uniform - however, I do understand about the poly count issues. Maybe the trick would be to have the adjacent grass terrain be a significantly lower poly count, allowing for the increase in the poly count of the track. 

[CaveGnome]

Maybe some incomplete tracks depicting hard ground or tracks with some stones across could help with the uniform effect without pushing poly count.

[Verilazic]

A small rock between the tracks at some point maybe?

[MerricksDad]

feel free to play with these

 

 

https://www.dropbox....roads10.7z?dl=0

 

I had these stashed from a few years ago, but touched them up a bit for today. They use just the standard textures now, instead of custom stuff I had made to wrap the entire tile. I would suggest changing them so that a texture with more transparent edge is used for the ruts. The ruts are mapped in such a way that the z axis on the model renders from the edge of the road down to the center of a rut, using the original TTR01 road texture.

 

If you use these, remember to turn off shadows on both meshes per model, and maybe create a flat plane of 2 or 4 polygons to serve as your secondary shadow caster, turning off render on that mesh.

[KlatchainCoffee]

Considering I have spent at least part of my childhood around unpaved mud roads going through tracts of wilderness.... some 'features' with big muddy ruts/holes (possibly with a 'cart already really stuck in it' variant) - would make a great addition.

[Frith5]

Long as we're talking about it all.... I'd love some 'pull off' spots, where wagons have left the trail, parked, then rejoined it. Just a small loop, and maybe a bigger area of matted down, killed grass. Also, how about a few placeable scabs/scars to put on trees that are too close to the 'road'.

[YeoldeFog]

Not to crash the party but... I love this idea, but I would like to see it in another tileset, like the Project Q tileset or medieval rural!

[MerricksDad]

What we need is tile sections which can easily be substituted into any tileset. The mountain tiles I am working on have 5 (actually unneeded) polygons across both directions. It makes it easy to see where some feature needs to go, and I can pick either block 2: up against the adjacent terrain type, or block 3: dead center. For rivers I can pick block 2 or block 4, and cause the river to flow different directions based on my selection.

 

If we had road tiles lain out that way for all mostly-flat tilesets, we could just change the grass texture, or otherwise script-replace the road section into the tile. For instance, in a 5 row/column tile, detach and set column 3 on a dummy in the center. Then you can replace the contents on the dummy easily via a command line script, or with a custom tool in GMAX.

 

If we start thinking of tiles as collections of sub objects, we could move toward a more fluid tileset creation method many of could make use of. Pop out old river section, introduce new one. Remove river, add road. Remove road, add walkpath. Add/remove trees, or replace species based on dummy name. Why stop at texture replacement?