New Roads

[Legacy_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.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_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

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_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. 

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_CaveGnome]

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

               
            

[Legacy_Verilazic]

               

A small rock between the tracks at some point maybe?

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_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.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_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. '>

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_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'.

'>

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_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! '>

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_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?