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Tutorial for Road Creation


Sotha

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Great tutorial. LIke it is said here, with patches it is a lot easier to first create the whole group of objects (all pieces of the road, in the example) and then modify it as one, to create a gradual slope, or a long curve, say.

Edited by RPGista
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Thank you! I was under the impression that manual Vertex blending through exporting to .ASE, then vertex painting in Blender was the only way to do this kind of stuff. I'll definitely try it out.

 

these techniques are not the same, but vertex blending will look much more natural in game. If you ever inspect one of these grass blend alphas up close, you'll see what I mean.

That aside, this method is a great workaround if you wish to keep everything in DR (which is not a terrible idea by any means)

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these techniques are not the same, but vertex blending will look much more natural in game. If you ever inspect one of these grass blend alphas up close, you'll see what I mean.

That aside, this method is a great workaround if you wish to keep everything in DR (which is not a terrible idea by any means)

 

Huh? I'm not sure what this means.. The grass looks just fine even with close inspection.

 

See for yourself:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/7z4d60

Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Thanks for this tutorial, it's exactly what I needed.

I have two fairly large outdoor areas:

a manor and outbuildings in the outer ward of a castle (aiming for 'realism'), and a visportally separated pagan area (aiming for 'fantastic').

Both need to be covered with roads and paths - esp. the manor yards.

The tutorial is complete in itself and doesn't need much if anything in the way of prior experience with patches. Actually it's the first tutorial I've worked thru' (or seen) that focuses on creating a wild/organic look, and it's saving my butt.

 

(Tho' I'm still not anywhere near confident that this latest attempt at creating a DM .map will work. It's my fourth attempt! I totally erased my first three when they failed - the failures were that dismal - but for some awful and unknown reason I still insist on trying to create an expansive outdoor setting. Well, I did manage to save out some iffy prefabs....)

 

I created templates for 90-degree curves by successively grabbing fewer and fewer vertices of a straight segment and rotating 10-10-10-10-5-5-10-10-10-10 degrees. These segments can be rotated/mirrored and joined to fit a lot of situations. I couldn't figure out how to get a texture to seamlessly join e.g. two segments at matching 45-degree angles (that is, at the grid diagonals). Even when the vertices perfectly overlapped, the texture join at the seam was stark obvious and uniform across the entire length, so I'm not joining segments at an angle, on x,y and z axes.

 

Anyway, it seems to be working and I'm looking forward to endless hours of tweaking :)

 

canopus

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One thing you need to do is make sure the textures on both patches are perfectly aligned, so at least the texture is seamless across the line. I recall there's a way to copy/paste the scale and alignment directly from one patch to the other to do that (I know you can for brushes. I think you can for patches too), but I don't recall the exact method offhand. I know it's written down somewhere.

 

My initial guess is literally copying the values from the texture alignment slot of one patch, and pasting them into the texture alignment slot of the other patch. But IIRC there was also a way you could quickly hold down some key and click the mouse on each patch to quickly align the textures. Look up the Dark Radiant key-binds; it may be in that list.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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You can paste make a seamless paste of identical textures onto patches like this:

1) create a temporary brush of any size.

2) apply the texture you want to have on the patches onto the temporary brush

3) set the texture to whatever scale you want using the surface inspector. I usually use 0.5 scale and press the natural-button. You must set the scale on the temporary brush, it is difficult to adjust the scale on the patch.

4) select the brush face pointing towards the sky (ctr + shift + left click)

5) copy shader

6) select all the patches you want to have a seamless texture on it. Note the patch surface must point towards the same direction as the temporary brush face you copied the texture from.

6) Paste shader. Or if it didn't work, try paste shader (natural).

Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

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Thanks for these responses!

I apologize for posting and running, but I was immediately called away to my other place (workshop), which doesn't have internet.

 

I think you should expect newbie/basic questions from me :)

 

I think when one is editing natural paths that go inside/outside, up hills and around bends, a person is forced to in effect do vertex by vertex tweaking through the whole thing, to control how each point of the path goes with the flow. I'm totally convinced by Sotha's modular system.

 

As for my own progress, I'm still acquainting myself with Dark Mod resources. They're impressive and give materials for creating a complete world -- I congratulate you all for having done it. Fact is that none of my work yet meets the standards, but in some ways I'm coming closer.

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