Road Architect: Roads, intersections and bridges for Unity [RELEASED]

Road Architect
Road architect is a professional quality road system creator featuring dynamic intersections, bridges and many other road objects.

Links:

• GitHub: https://github.com/MicroGSD/RoadArchitect

Intersections:

Dynamic Procedurally generated based upon lanes, road width and angle of attack.
Turn lanes Complete left and right optional turn lanes.
Traffic lights Fully functioning and heavily detailed traffic light system including left on yield and right turn lane only lights.
Assets Includes several assets such as traffic light poles, street lights, traffic lights, stop signs and more. Most include rigid body versions for dynamic environments.

Bridges:

Bridge wizard Allows for instant creation of professional quality bridges such as causeway, arch, suspension and more. All bridge creation aspects are generated instantly allowing quick iteration.
Customization Custom extrusion allows for mix and match of bridge parts. Over 50 bridge parts included.
Details Many different types of railing, bases, center dividers included.
Curvature Curvature of bridges supported including arch and suspension bridges.

Railing and extrusions:

Railing 12+ Railing types included such as K-Rails and W Beams.
Center dividers Many center divider options including the most popular configurations such as K-Rails with blinders or street lights. All aspects of mesh extrusion are performed instantly allowing quick iteration.
Collision barriers Water barrels and other collision barriers come with prefabricated rigid or static body configurations.
Custom extrusion Extrude any custom mesh along the spline with almost limitless customization.

Assets:

Road assets several road assets included such as street lights, double lights, stop signs and more. All aspects of road asset placement are done instantly, allowing for quick iterations.
Custom assets Place any custom mesh along the spline with an extreme amount of customization options.
Signs 300+ U.S. federal and state road signs are pre-built and available for use.
Future assets Assets will be added and freely available as time progresses.

Quality:

Speed All mesh extrusion, bridge extrusion and road asset placement actions are instantaneous. Optimized road generation results in an average 100ms per (2km road + 1 intersection). Multithreaded support.
Quality Most road textures at least 1024x1024 resolution. Most materials include normal and specular maps. Most assets created to federal or state specification.
Customization Full customization is available. Hundreds of customization options. Full source code.

 

wow.
'nuff said.

 

Might need merge lanes? Railroad crossings (with railroad track)?

Sounds great already and also headed in the right direction!

 

Awesome! Looks fantastic. Good job!

 

Hi MicroGSD

Very nice product.
Will you implement roundabouts and European traffic light support in the future ?

Norby

 

Oh my... this is so awesome!

I am also very interestend in roundabouts and especially(!) european traffic lights and signs.

 

I've added the following to be added in the next content update:

• Railroad crossings with typical railroad crossing items
• European traffic light system
• European road signs
• European road marking materials
• All European items added will mostly match http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_Road_Signs_and_Signals

We'll have European traffic lights and signs included in the next content update.

Roundabouts and cul-de-sacs are currently in the upcoming feature list. I can't give you a time table right now but if it becomes a widely requested feature we can improve the priority and implement it more quickly.

I've added Railroad crossings with all the typical crossing items (protection bars, signs, etc) to the next content update.

Lane merging is slated for development. While we add merge lanes it will be included along with highway off/on ramps and dynamic parking lot placement (for easy placement of highway rest stops or gas stations). Further dynamic lane support is also slated for development in that we will allow scenarios similar to this: http://microgsd.com/images/TS/TS1.jpg

Thanks for the comments everyone and let me know if you have any more content or feature requests!

 

This is very impressive, well done! If I ever had the manpower to use such a system to its fullest i'd be in road heaven. I guess it's worth asking - does it deform terrain a-la easyroads? I didnt read it so I didnt assume, also, have you made any plans regarding web GIS implementation? particularly OpenStreetMaps as it's well known

 

Thanks for the comments! Road Architect fully supports terrain deformation.

It also supports smart active history which actively deforms terrain, removes details and removes trees and has the capability to revert all three to their original state if the road moves or gets deleted.

It also does the terrain deformation without requiring to modify the entire terrain's heightmap data at once. Unlike other tools, you can edit the terrain outside of your road's terrain deformation width and the road system will not overwrite your changes. This helps facilitate a much more friendly and more efficient workflow.

Road Architect also fully supports multi-terrain construction. For example, you can create a massive multiterrain world with a wonderful tool like TerrainComposer and build roads on it flawlessly. However, if you change the terrain heightmap resolution after you've created roads it may create issues and require the terrain history to be reset on roads which causes the road to "forget" it's terrain history and to learn the new data.

We'd definitely like to support some form of automatic implementation based on real world maps but at the moment our road system can't match enough real life road scenarios (like lane merging, off ramps, cloverleafs, 90 degree turns) to make that happen reliably. But hopefully it will in the future.

 

Looks very interesting. But link to manual is broken: http://microgsd.com/Support/RoadsManual.aspx

And would this work with Terrain 4 Mobile -- after finishing the road, can you convert the terrain to a mesh, and the roads will still look good?

 

Sorry about the broken link, it has been fixed. This is the correct URL to the online manual: http://microgsd.com/Support/RoadArchitectManual.aspx

I've never used Terrain 4 Mobile. If it simply converts the terrain into a mesh and does not alter the height points of the terrain then it should work. But I can't definitively say that it will work having not used it myself.

If using it with Terrain 4 Mobile or similar that removes the unity terrain, you should drag the "MainMeshes" gameobject (here) out from the Road and into a separate game object like so: here. Then similarly if you've created intersections, move the main intersections gameobject "Intersections" (listed in the screenshots as well) outside of the road system. This will prevent the road from trying to update the meshes without a terrain present which would cause issues. In the next update I'll have this issue fixed so these steps are not needed.

 

So, your tool can't be use with a mesh terrain or an Procedural planet?!

 

I'm not sure what terrain method the Procedural Planet asset uses, I have never used the asset. If it does not use the typical Unity terrain then the terrain deformation will not work with the asset.

 

Really cool, congrats!

 

Bridge side barriers, and some large bridges are looking like very high poly. Are you going to make polygon optimizations in future releases for mobile?

Edit: Can it make automatic pavements (as side object) for city roads?

 

Some of the materials and textures make the generated structures look a lot more high poly than they actually are.

There are quite a few railings to choose from, some of which are low poly: http://microgsd.com/images/ts/TS6.jpg

If poly count is a concern you can also utilize many features in Road Architect to reduce the polycount such as straight line bridges and reducing the road definition. These options are covered in the manual and in the tutorial videos.

If you're making large bridges, such as 1,500 meters or 2,000 meters long the polycount will be higher than your typical bridge.

If there becomes a need for even lower poly items I can introduce them in the next content update.

It could make sidewalks and curbs but it's not currently included in the package so you'd have to import your own custom meshes to do so. I'll probably make some and include them in the next content update.

 

Hi guys,

I've bought this tool and it has many more features than EasyRoads, but I think it has a critical flaw - the poly count. I made a typical road with a two bridges (no railing on the roads) and my scene jumped from 8k to over 900k tris and over a million verts. The bridges and road look nice, but I think you could make things look just as nice with a much, much lower poly count.

The tool is there. I think it's great, it's just the objects and maybe the shaders that need work. Not in a quality way, but in a restraint way. Although you can use Unity for visualizations (I imagine) it's much better suited to games. Game developers are restrained.

You can take the angle of saying, "Well, just use this on PC / Mac" (I've seen Asset developers take this route) but I think that's a mistake. Unity's strength is all the platforms you can publish to. If I made a killer app with your roads tool I'd want it on as many platforms that Unity supports.

To summarize - the tool - excellent. The objects / shaders - "less is more". Road objects don't need a lot of poly detail.


Cheers!

 

Road Architect looks amazing! Congratulations on the release!
Questions:
- can i do this? (this one is modeled in Silo)


- can i export the generated geometry?
- can i NOT use terrain and still manipulate elevations, curves, etc.?
- can i use my own textures (for road surface and props)?
- can i use my own props?

- how would you compare Road Architect to Bob's Track Builder?
- and to CityScape 1.8?

Regardless of your answer I'll buy it, so don't worry.

Thank you!

 

Thanks for the comments and feedback!

Here's some statistics, available in the demoscene:

• 2.3km long road with 2km long bridge (Golden Gate copy), is 84.3k triangles and 144.5k vertices
• 2.15km long road without any additions is 15.9k triangles and 32.5k vertices.
• Entire demoscene without terrain is ~931.6k triangles and 1.4 million vertices with 12km worth of roads, 6 intersections (fully loaded) and 4 bridges (fully loaded), one of which is 2km long.

The triangle count can be cut in half by altering the road definition from 5 meters to 10 meters (or even more with higher values for roads without many curves). The bridge triangle count can also be reduced by changing the bridges to straight line bridges. Doing both options I've reduced the entire demoscene to 400k triangles. The triangle count for bridges can be reduced further by using lower triangle count bridge pieces in the bridges.

If further poly reduction is required the "disable shoulders" checkbox can be checked and either no shoulders can be used or custom road materials with wider lanes to emulate shoulders can be created.

Road Architect was made to start highest quality with multiple options to reduce the quality including road definition, straight line bridges, road alterations and base texture restrictions. Some of the material's shaders can be swapped with more basic shaders. If we didn't go far enough in allowing low poly counts that will be something we need to address.

The triangle count and vertex count you gave for only one road with two bridges reaches the same triangle count and vertex count as the entirety of the demoscene. How long is your road? What method are you using to calculate the total triangles and vertex count?

 

Hi, thanks for the comments and questions!

can i do this? (this one is modeled in Silo) I don't think you could make it look as detailed as the Silo scene but you can make a separated highway system with bridges and overpasses. The materials are included for that. However, onramps are not currently supported and more advanced highway systems with proper medians or shared shoulders are not supported. All of the above is on our upcoming features list, we'd like to be able to do something like the above scene, but the answer in Road Architect's current state is no.

"can i export the generated geometry?" Yes, you can export the generated geometry using the Window->Road Architect->Export menu. Some other assets can also help with exporting.

"can i NOT use terrain and still manipulate elevations, curves, etc.?" You can manipulate the road's elevation and curves without a terrain but it will not deform anything other than terrain and it'll cause issues with the road shoulders at the moment, it'll be fixed in the next update. I would recommend against doing so until the next update.

can i use my own textures (for road surface and props)? can i use my own props?" Yes you can use your own textures and models easily with Road Architect. You can even save props / meshes in the library wizard menu so you can just click to add your custom items just like the included items.

how would you compare Road Architect to Bob's Track Builder? This is the first time I've looked at Bob's Track Builder and my first impression is that it is a pretty cool tool and high quality with a proven track record of quality. It looks different from Road Architect in that (correct me if I'm wrong) doesn't support bridges and intersections. An undocumented feature in Road Architect is that you can create a track by dragging a road's end node on top of the road's start node.

CityScape 1.8? CityScape 1.8 looked great and it's unfortunate they closed down (correct me if I'm wrong). If it came out with a fully fledged version we probably would've used that instead of making an internal tool (Road Architect). Edit: It looks like the CityScape guys now do http://www.esri.com/software/cityengine . I wonder if it is any good?

 

Hi !
your tools look great !
I'm a BobTrackBuilder user too, so 1 important question for me :
- does Road Architect have Camber settings for road ( like BTB) ?

i guess Road Assets be LOD objects ? right ?
tks

 

Hi, thanks for the comments!

Road Architect does not have Camber settings for the road, but it is an interesting feature that I haven't thought of yet. I'll add it to our issue tracker.

The assets in Road Architect do not come with any LOD options embedded, you'll need to implement them yourself with whichever level of detail method you currently use. There's too many different LOD methods used by users for us to package a method within Road Architect.

Thanks!

 

Isn't this just easyroads3d??

 

It's better.than EasyRoads3D.

 

Not saying it isn't, but as someone trying to choose between them I'm interested in how it is better.

 

Road Architect and EasyRoads3D are both good quality tools with many different features and drawbacks. Ultimately we'd prefer you choose our tool but I think with either tool you get good road systems. It's just a matter of which features and content matches your development needs the most.

A significant amount of road asset content comes with Road Architect, getting you ready to go out of the box.

• 14 included complete bridge types to choose from via easy to use wizard menu which automatically create quality bridges with railing and other details.
• Traffic light systems for intersections which are automatically created and placed properly, including left turn on yield option and right lane turn only lights.
• 330+ included federal and US road signs and materials
• 21 included extrusion (railing etc) items to choose from via easy to use wizard menu
• About 30 different road edge objects to choose from via easy to use wizard menu
• We're trying to keep a monthly or 6-week content update schedule. Expect 5-10 new road assets and some features every update.

Other differentiating features of Road Architect:

• $60
• Fully fledged multilane intersections with stop signs and traffic light systems embedded
• Full future integration of our upcoming AI traffic system
• Full source code provided
• Support for deck arch bridges and suspension bridges.
• Smart terrain history capabilities allowing editing the terrain (outside of the road's height mod width) after road construction
• Multithreaded road construction (useful in large worlds)
• Separate materials and physic materials for shoulders and roads.
• Visit our website for a full listing of features and upcoming features.

Road Architect focused on providing the tools necessary to create large top quality road, intersection and bridge systems in a short amount of time with the secondary goal of fully supporting our upcoming AI traffic system. Working with such large sized worlds we needed a way to add road systems fast and have functioning intersections and top quality bridges with minimal effort.

Internally we are using a heavily customized version of Road Architect to efficiently make very large road systems (131km^2 256km^2) for our upcoming game. We decided to provide the full source code to Road Architect so other developers could have the same option to customize Road Architect.

 

What if there are three streets/roads crossing each other forming an intersection such as 6th Avenue, 34th Street, and Broadway in Manhattan?

 

Thanks for the insight, are there any plans to make it compatible with IRDS?

 

Great. From a vehicule physic point of view , camber in turns are really important to improve stability !

 

I don't think Road Architect will support that for a while. We want to support about 95% to 99% of real life road configurations. Anything that falls in the 1% or 0.1% or lower will probably not be supported such as very extreme road grades, unique intersections and roads like Lombard Street.

We are making our own AI traffic system which will fully integrate with Road Architect. It most resembles real life traffic. Lane changes, path navigation, intersection and stop sign obeying, overtaking, pulling over, etc are currently working. The release date is unknown.

I'm unclear on the capabilities of IRDS but it appears they already have a track builder included? Strictly in terms of AI I would venture to say that we probably won't support a 3rd party Racing AI. But Road Architect does use a simple spline node system which any developer can provide integration with if desired.

 

I purchased Road Architect and I am trying to add my first road to my terrain. Please see the following workflow video of what is happening. Does this in the demo scene as well.

Appreciate the help!

Regards,

Gary

EDITED: Steven is helping with issues on the Mac version of Unity. See continued responses in thread below.

 

I suppose you used the lock selection thing, which is on upright corner of the screen, just below the layout selection tab. Try toggling it, might work.

 

The lock is not enabled.

 

- In cities, i need to have curbs (foot pavement) in both sides of roads. How easy is it to make road architect generate them? They need to be perfectly alligned with road just like a road railing.

- Are you going to let us create lower polygon roads for mobile developers? Asking you are going to make optimizations in whole system including the base road without additions.
"2.15km long road without any additions is 15.9k triangles and 32.5k vertices."
It still looks large to me for a basic road.

 

Now getting an error in the console...

IndexOutOfRangeException: Array index is out of range.
GSD.Threaded.GSDRoadCreationT.RoadJob_DoPrelim (.GSDRoad tRoad) (at Assets/RoadArchitect/GSDRoadUtilityT.cs:1403)
GSD.Threaded.GSDRoadCreationT.RoadJob_Prelim (.GSDRoad tRoad) (at Assets/RoadArchitect/GSDRoadUtilityT.cs:861)
GSD.Threaded.RoadCalcs1.ThreadFunction () (at Assets/RoadArchitect/GSDRoadUtilityT.cs:6495)

 

Hi Gary, I'm sorry you are having issues.

I was able to reproduce on a slow machine while lifting up the ctrl button too early.

I'll contact you on Skype shortly for a temporary fix.

Thanks.

Edit: To anyone with the ctrl-clicking issue: If you're on a mac, use the shift key instead and it should work functionally the same.

 

Hey y'all!

Steven is helping me with issues with it running on the Mac! Great support!


Gary

 

Gary and I found some issues with Road Architect and here's the status of the issues:

Completed fixes (contact us at support@microgsd if you would require an early update):

• Having no materials on any section of roads or intersections should be supported now. Will be fixed in the next asset store update. This is to support walk paths or bike paths.
• You can now select a "none" option for stop signs / traffic lights. Will be implemented in the next asset store update. This is to help facilitate walk path / bike paths intersections.
• Physics materials option settings fixed (found this while fixing the materials issue).

Remaining issues mostly centered:

• MAC Only: The ctrl click not working on MAC will be fixed in the next asset store update. For now use the shift key instead.
• MAC Only: The intersection gizmo not being clickable on MAC will be fixed in the next update, in the mean time you can select it in the hiearchy menu.
• Walking / bike paths: Intersections require a lane width of 5 meters to function properly. That might rule out usage for walk paths since they'd be 10 meters wide. It would require a significant code change to support smaller lanes in the intersections. I don't know if we'll restrict minimum lane size or fix the issue to allow smaller lanes.
• I've added copy road in the issue tracker for the next update, which will copy a road's settings to a brand new road.
• I've added "shrinking bridge pieces widths automatically to the road's width" to the issue tracker.
• We will make intersection construction more clear in the UI.

I'd like Road Architect to support intersecting walk/bike paths at a width smaller than 10 meters but it's not going to be a supported feature until at least the next update.

Curbs and sidewalks are going to be included in the next content update.

For the 2.15km road, disabling shoulders and changing the road definition to 10 meters lowers the triangle count to 2800 triangles and 5800 vertices.

 

Guys,

Just want to say that Steve has done a great job of addressing my questions and helping me with the support issues(on a Sunday no less!) Looks like an update needs to happen with the asset to fit my needs. All that being said, if you need roads with intersections and the ability to add a ton of really cool details. Pick this up! The future looks bright for RoadArchitect!

Gary

 

This tool really looks great.
A very useful feature, will be to import some splines to make the road.
In every cases, when I 've made a road in 3DSMax, i already have the center axis of the road imported from Autocad. And I don't have to draw it again.

 

Thanks for responding, just have purchased road architect ;

By the way I am very interested for the Traffic AI. Is there an ETA or any information about it in your website?

 

Hii.. MicroGSD,
I am working on educational game for training of disaster responder. I need an environment situating post disaster, such as, earthquake. So, is it possible to create the damaged roads using this tool? Thanks.

 

I agree that this would be a useful feature. I'll add it to the issue tracker. I have some concern about the spline settings not matching up perfectly (tension, etc) so I'm not sure how reliable it would be. I guess it would probably be ok for most cases if the road "mostly" followed the imported spline as long as it hit the imported nodes perfectly.

The traffic AI release date is unknown but its a lot easier to program than the road creator was. I'd guess 2 months or less. I should have some videos up on it in a few weeks. Right now it supports EdyCar and UnityCar, and we might create our own vehicle to support very large traffic. It will also be multiplayer compatible but it really depends on which network engine you use for your game.

Out of the box this isn't possible, but if you make your own road textures and materials it should be possible. If you require the mesh to actually be broken up and damaged then I don't think that is possible. But you can achieve similar effect if you create your own materials.

 

I work in the sim industry myself and I'd like to leverage this with street data in a GoogleEarth KML. Assuming I could get the KML LLEs to XYZ, How difficult would it be for me to script Architect to read in my file, create a road node for each point, and then split the resulting street mesh into a series of UTM tiles?

 

Hi,

I am very interested in this tool ... but I have my doubts ...

1) Has a LOD management? (For me it is essential because I have to create a fairly large city)


Thanks in advance and congratulations.

 

It would be pretty difficult to do that and there's a lot of real life scenarios which Road Architect can't support yet, such as 90 degree turns and other unique scenarios. We're aiming to cover 95% to 99% of the most common road formations in upcoming updates.

However, the guys with Map-ity have starting attempting to integrate Road Architect with their asset and might provide some results you are looking for if they can figure it out. Road Architect is a very large code base and takes a while to learn but so far they are doing a great job with the difficult task.

Thanks for your comments, Road Architect does not come with an LOD system. We did not implement an LOD system or terrain holes for tunnels because there are so many different solutions and possibilities out for both and we simply couldn't make it plug n play with all of the solutions and controller possibilities. So we let the user decide and implement which LOD system to use based upon their own customized project, player controllers and etc.

We might implement a light weight LOD system based on if it's close to any scene camera and outside of its clip.

 

Hi guys,

Just wanted to say great asset and it's great to be working with you!

We're working hard to get a sample together of Map-ity and RoadArchitect together for you to use.

So far we have road generation working nicely. Intersections are next. In the screenshot we only had to manually drag the nodes to create the intersection. Took less than a minute to re-create this part of San Francisco!

 

Arrgh stop making me spend money

 

I hope it is worth your money!

On a separate note some machines may experience road markings not displaying correcting when rendering with DX11. We'll have a fix for it soon.

 

well my provisional funding comes soon so i get a bit of finance to get some of the stuff i need (Really the amount of stuff needed to make a serious game is obscene) and in the long run i finda mapicity (which i own) and your software very tempting for filling out large realistic road systems, the more integration with mapicity you have the more useful it becomes by a massive degree, given roads are designed by experienced engineers with pragmatism of extreme importance, and real world data is going to look a lot more convincing than anything I try. Along the same thing, some things im talking to the easyroads guy with makes easyroads actually a very nice complement to all this and its nice to see when two 'competing' systems arent really competetive at all,and rather they augment each other as needed

So yes, mapicity's colaborations with BuildR have looked good and so long as BuildR can give me the control to construct some complex facades,thats a good procedural system there. Road architect working well with OSM is extremely useful and I think possibly in most use cases very large road systems would rely on integration with OSM even just as part of the research phase where a good understanding of how road systems develop is important to create a convincing appropriation when creating an entirely new road system (Although I personally would just zoom around google earth until i found something that more or less represented what i wanted, get the equivalent data from osm and build my roads out of it then tweak, not being an engineer but being very preoccupied with something looking genuine i'd rather rely on design and engineering that cost some local council or government a great deal of money than some hack job by my ignorant self)

Road architect seems to represent very much the template of american road systems, which is actually relevant to what i'm doing at the moment, but i'm european and i'd certainly like to represent european roads in future work, which does imply some strong changes in arrangement,especially in city road systems where very few cities here (in england) have a grid-like structure, in fact only the 'artificial' cities build in the second half of last century. Cities with more historical grounding are rather more complex affairs with non standard junctions everywhere, streets only a few meters long, hardly any roads being entirely straight whatsoever and so on. Is replicating these systems a massive pain in the arse or do you see them being introduced as the asset matures? And its fair enough (to me at least) to say that some things are a bit too much to take on, but I think of some of the junctions in england, including roundabouts (particularly a very famous assault against sense roundabout near milton keynes) where I think possibly something like a 'junction editor' might be something that would be useful, where you can arrange where the main tributaries join and how they navigate around the,sometimes confounding,systems

I suppose if you're not familiar with it, although its a subject of much mirth here, here's the magic roundabout of milton keynes, which if could be recreated procedurally, not to any great point but just so it could be said to be possible, would probably be considered pretty impressive (This isnt a serious feature request, more to get a laugh)