Feedback required: Road tool design

[morbid]

Hello everyone!

We'd faced some cornerstone design questions while working on Road Tool, and the final solution depends on your expectations and requests.

You'll find these questions right here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdgiEK9cpJcTPuz107ZyZug9Heua1R5ITH4WVcthbZ4W7xcyQ/viewform?usp=sf_link

Also, any of your thoughts and suggestions are welcome in this thread!

Thanks!

[demostenes]

Maybe it would be good idea to describe our use case. 12x12km terrain, with several cities and many small places worthy of visiting (villages, guild houses, taverns, ruins, caves...). It can be I dont know 100? 200? places. And we want to connect these places by roads/paths. Maximum length of road cca 5-7km. But majority will be short, up to 1km. So there shouldnt be any limitation on number of road objects in the scene. Hard to predict how many crossroads it will create, but there will be some for sure. For use case like random mud/dirt crossroad in the forest we probably dont need special crossroad texture, I can just cross two road decals and it should be sufficient. Different story is road texture in the city, you cant just simply cross such texture. Anyway If we use road object for roads in the city will depend on implementation (performance impact, how will be crossroads solved...), so we dont consider crossroads ability as critical feature, we can always manually make one mesh for all roads in the city, UV map in 3dmax and project it as decal.

Other suggestions:

Some tool for simple leveling of height map under road object would be quite helpful, we will create all roads manually.

It would be also nice to use this tool (I expect some spline based mesh generator, where you can configure spline and width of the road) as generator for water mesh for rivers.

I was thinking about ability to bake all decal roads into terrain diffuse texture as LOD to lower number of decal objects/segments in the scene and how to approach clutters, because in case of such baking you need to modify clutter masks too. But you dont want to modify clutter masks, because you loose advantage of auto clutter removal via decals. Also once you bake into terrain diffuse texture, there is no way back. Maybe solution could be creating additional RGBA texture, with RGB for baked road and A with information for clutters where to not put objects. And this texture will be alfa blended with terrain diffuse texture. So you will not loose ability of auto clutter removal and you can rebake many times as you need.

Edited August 31, 2018 by demostenes