World Building EasyRoads3D v3 - the upcoming new road system

No, it seems the standart assets that shipped with Unity 5.3.5p4 are relying on shader variables that didn't come with the Unity installation itself. So, not related to ER, no worry.

 

I don't know about the LB but I use Gaia and it can do this re-texturing, maybe it's helpful to know for you.

 

Hi Hakan,

Thank you. Is this layer based? I mean, I know there are several terrain tools that can texture a terrain. To preserve possible manual terrain changes in other areas, can Gaia update only the area affected by the road network?

Raoul

 

How about this? I removed the grass.



Here's a closer look without the height-based fog:

 

Hello Raoul. Your support from looking at the last several pages of this thread is excellent. I have some questions I would like to resolve before trying again. I am recreating this real world road run that is world famous for motorcycles named "Tail Of The Dragon" on hwy 129 in North Carolina. I have used the Real World Terrain plugin to grab 7x7km area and your excellent plugin to grab the OSM data and it created the road perfectly placed. A highly recommended combo!

Question 1 - Dense Random Roadside Trees and Groundcover Foilage

I have created over 55 trees, shrubs and detail foilage groupings. Trees are SpeedTrees and all tree species are grouped into single prefabs using just a bark and leaves shader per species as ST uses a new material per tree which adds dozens of the same texture maps per species. These were then made into prefabs that share the same two materials per species. In the video you can get a sense of the density. I have reviewed the videos for adding side objects but they are all evenly spaced and this will not look correct for a subtropical rainforest. How do I go about adding semi-random vegetations? The ground cover would be closest, a specific number of tree would be closer to the road and the more mature/taller trees be a secondary line with some overlaps between groundcover, first treeline and secondary mature treeline.

Question 2 - Roadside Textures Splatmapping or Roadside Textures

A. There appear to be three main roadside ground textures. 1. A stony texture. 2. A red clay/dead leaves texture. 3. A grassy type texture. What is the procedure for getting these into place and having some control over what texture is where and controlling the extents of each texture?

B. I also note that there are some one to several metre high embankments that are a lumpy red clay texture along the route. I saw in one thread reply you were indicating a stony embankment splat from farther away could be applied closer to the road. Is this something that can be controller procedurally or via marler in your system? I was also considering making an Embankment mesh with this red clay texture in ZBrush and using you system to apply to near vertical roadside embankment to avoid splatmap texture smearing and have a single mesh conform in multiple places to the side of the road. Is there a way to procedurally or through makers do this?

 

Hello ipdev,

Thank you for the compliments!

Question 1:

It looks like you can achieve this through the "Random Distance" and "Random X Offset" controls in the side object manager for the "Mesh" side object type. Is that what you meant? To achieve the "more mature" effect you can create two side objects with a larger "X Position" value for the "More Mature" side object.

V2 has a rock side object examples for random placement. I will add this to the v3 examples as well.

Question 2:

I am not entirely sure to which post you are referring?

It seems you need a solution for the limitations of the grid based nature of the unity terrain object not allowing smooth terrain embankments close to the side of the road or resulting in an ugly sawtooth kind of terrain deformation?

You can indeed deal with that using side objects. By using the shape type of side object, you can either create a wall smoothly following the road or a terrain mesh overlay with terrain textures (like in the mountain road images on the first page of this thread). You can use this in critical areas only by activating the side object for the markers in those areas. You can fine tune this by applying an offset for the start / end marker. If you want a more complex shape you could indeed also use the procedural side object type with your ZBrush source model.

Additionally you can adjust the terrain deformation for these markers, the marker "Indent Alignment" dropdowns
in the Inspector, to make sure the terrain will not interfere with these side objects.

Please let me know if you have more questions regarding this or if you meant something else!

Thanks,
Raoul

 

Hi Stephen,

Yes, that is what I meant. That will be very useful. I guess you can make this effect stronger by adjusting the inclination values? And indeed this is layer based, is that right? This will only affect areas where the terrain was adjusted to the road network?

Thanks,
Raoul

 

Yes, this is layer based in that the texture (or textures) can be bended in the areas near the road. This can be done by creating an LB Map of the area around the road using the road data. We are currently considered making purely additive Texture "layers" that can be applied in isolation - kind of like a post-processing effect on the landscape.

Blending is currently controlled by strength (with or without noise) relative to other textures in the landscape at those points affect by the LB Map. The strength is controlled by a slider in the editor.

 

If you mean re-texturing only a small area, yes it can do it.

 

Thank you Hakan, as mentioned this is also on the list to add but it is good to know that it can also be done with LB and Gaia.

Raoul

 

OK. On Question 1. I just drop my roadside vegetation folder into your EasyRoads 3D Models folder and import the lot to set up whatever object of yours I need as well as my Roadside Vegetation and then go to the Side Objects tab and click "Add Project Side Objects". Is that correct?

On Question 2. I have the terrain so it exhibits very little sawtooth. I have gone out and photographed roadside dirt and rock and made them into tileable maps. Is there a method where I can texture the sides of the road using these with your toolset? It is and 11 mile run with alot of curves and I do not look forward to carpal tunnel syndrome As well is there a way to texture based on roadside slope? flat gets one texture..20-45 degrees gets another and beyond 45 degrees gets a third?

 

Qustion 1.

You can keep your own side object related assets wherever you want in the assets folder. "Import Project Side Objects" will import the side object already created in other scenes. You can create a new side object through the "Create New Side Object" button at the top.

For vegetation side objects you may want to check the palm example. This prefab is selected from the Terrain Vegetation dropdown which simply lists all available terrain trees. The associated tree prefab will be assigned automatically to the Source Object slot which is where you would want to drop your side object prefab for non terrain vegetaion side objects. In Edit Mode the trees are simply instantiated but in Build Mode the trees will be added to the terrain vegetation system.

Question 2.

Is this road related or terrain related? It sounds terrain related, isn't this exactly what has been discussed in the last posts? Have the terrain re textured based on the slope after terrain deformation?

Thanks,
Raoul

 

Raoul, is there any word on v3? And whether it'll be usable at runtime? I love Easy Roads but as I generate the rest of the world procedurally from data files, I've started working on changing the roads over to be procedurally generated too.

 

Hi Zireael07,

V3 is available in betas, it is part of the asset store download as a separate package.

It will completely replace v2 when work on additional assets (road textures, side objects) is finished also including a new demo project. But meanwhile there is also some time put in v3.x features that will be included in the demo project as custom prefabs, like Culs-de-sac and Y crossings.

Yes, v3 includes a scripting API that also works at runtime. You can use that for both creating roads as for AI purposes as it will also give you access to the road spline data, etc.

Thanks,
Raoul

 

Alas I don't have access to the beta as I don't have the money to pay for the pro version. Any idea when v3 will be available for us poor folks?

 

I am doing my best, preparing all the additional assets isn't exactly done in a couple of weeks either. These are the last steps, it has been a long process, it doesn't make sense to rush it at this stage. Preparing builds for the free version is also being worked on at the moment so I am working to having that released as well once v3 Pro replace v2 Pro.

Thanks,
Raoul

 

@ippdev, I'm interested in an answer to question 2 as well for my next project. Only things I can think of are:

1. Create the road and try to export the shape as a mesh somehow (@raoul is this even possible?) and then then use that mesh to make a mask that can be used in any terrain tool that can use masks . The masked areas can then be edited via the tools layer/spawn rules. I am pretty sure you can do this kind of thing in gaia and terrain composer.

2. Create the road. Do a screen grab to put in to an image package to create a height map than can be scaled and used as a stamp to carve the terran. In other words same as 1 but without a mesh to make in to stamp.

3. The erosion brush that is on 24 hours sale now can texture the eroded/painted areas in a more advanced way than standard terrain brushes. Could be quickest just to make the road and then use that tool to carve the terrain and it looks like it will texture at the same time.

Not sure how well any will work though.

Any suggestions appreciated

 

On the import of Side Objects. I think it is understood now. I was looking for a bulk import method and am aware that I have to set the usage parameters per side object. I assumed placing them in the EasyRoads3D Models folder in a subfolder would add them automatically to the dropdown.

On the roadside splats or texturing. (ignore the slope as I figured that one out using the Distingo Shader) Much of the roadside in the real world has a margin of 0.5 meters to 3 meters of dirt, pebbled rock and assorted short vegetation such as grass and small plants. To hand paint in these roadside margins using the Terrain Brush over an 11 mile road with 138 curves is a formula for carpal tunnel syndrome and frustration as well as a time eater so of course I am seeking a more automated method to accomplish this. To further define my issue I am going to note that now that I have flattened and smoothed the terrain using the minimum possible values for the white border the terrain is flattened to a minimum (set by your plugin when I tried to input 1 meter) of approximately 3.5 meters either side of the road which is 10 meters in width and smooths into the surrounding terrain for a further 2 meters. This is too much in many places where a steep slope can begin rising within 1 meter of the roadside edge. So my thinking for a solution is as follows.

1. Restore all 36 Terrains (a grid of 6x6 at 1200 meters square per terrain chunk).
2. Regenerate the Road Network at a width of 8 meters.
3. Set the white margin to 3.5 meters for flattening and 2 meters for smoothing and then rebuild the terrains using the new road width under the Terrain Control tab.
4. Enable Back To Edit Mode Without Terrain Restore (to save the current Terrain smoothing with an 8 meter road width)
5. Regenerate the Road Network at a width of 10 meters which should allow the often abrupt sloping of the terrain within 1.5 meters of the roadside edges.
6A. Texture Option 1 - For the Two Lane Road Texture Map I add rock, dirt and small vegetation margins fading to alpha zero on either side of the road texture approximately 1/5th of the texture width.
6B. Texture Option 2 - Create left an right Mesh Strips approximately 2 meters wide and 100 meters long that have the rock, dirt and small vegetation. Add these to the Roadside Objects and set the X Position = 0 (assuming I have the axis origins at the left and right edges of the mesh strips). Set the Y Position = 0, the Y-axis Rotation to Follow Road and check the Snap To Terrain checkbox. For Terrain Alignment I am inclined to set this to "Terrain Normal". It is possible that "Path Forward" or Path Normal" may be thew better choice. Given what i am trying to achieve what is your conclusion as to which type of Terrain Alignment I should choose from the dropdown menu choices.

Can you spot any flaws or snags I may run into from the above steps?

Thank you for your awesome support so far!

 

I may have a better way. Check my latest post and await Raouls answers/confirmations. Mesh strips that conform to the roadside edges have the advantage of creating several strips of longer lengths and narrow as needed for your needs as well as avoiding tiling of textures. I assume using the marker system you can use flat, up-sloping or down-sloping as is needed per section. Since I have many tight curves and the terrain is defined closely by real world characteristics I am assuming prior to Raoul's confirmation that these will adhere to the road curvatures and snug to the road edges.

 

Think I am understanding you method. Easyroads is one of next tools I will be learning but getting ideas of best practice will hopefully stop me gaining bad habits. This is my first game and from trying to learn everything have discoved a lot of time can be wasted by not getting an idea best practice.

If you like bike racing check this out -

Just over the water from here. Amazing to watch but extremely dangerous. Too many deaths and injuries. Guy Martin in the video is a real character and top rider.

Edit - And obviously so is Michael Dunlop who he is chasing. Get's the adrenaline going just watching it. Need a cup of tea now and a minute

At around 8 - 8 3/4 mins it feels like watching a sped up film. Until you realise it's real time!

 

I am creating motorcycle runs for real world roads that are famous for such. The first is The Tail Of The Dragon located near Robbinsville North Carolina on Hwy 129. I definitively have to create automated pipelines as this is only a 7x7km map patch and I need to keep the terrains near 1km per grid square or I cannot get the detail patches high enough. One of the other runs, The Devils Triangle closeby works out to a 21km square patch which means a grid of 20x20 at a little over 1km sq per terrain. There are 5 others just as complex. That is a lotta ouch on the wrist unless i get an automated system in place. I just finished a method to extract detailed splats per terrain using the google maps texture per terrain. Took me 20 minutes to splatmap 36 terrains..except now i have to figure out how to input the alpha channel into the ARGB32 texture imports needed for splats as the RGB channels are great in the tiff and give me awesome variation. Back to Photoshop.

 

More can be added to this. Like, updating the terrain vegetation prototypes with new trees and mark them as Terrain vegetatio in the side object manager. But, at mentioned, at this moment it works the other way around, the available terrain tree prototypes are listed in the dropdown.

Step 4 - 5. I don't think expanding the width from 8 to 10 after flattening the terrain nased on an 8 meter wide road will work. As mentioned before these minimum values are based on the terrains heightmapscale (size vs heightmap resolution), the terrain will be deformed with the most optimal results for an 8 meter wide road. When you increase the road width afterwards the terrain will very likely poke through the road in some areas or the road will float above the terrain. You can check this by doing a quick test with a short road segment in an hilly area.

6A. These rock/dirt/vegetation margins are added to the road texture, is that right? Since you mention "fading to alpha zero", you may want to do tests with this as well. Fadinf to alpha zero means you will need the Transparent shader, do you want the road to always receive shadows?

6B. That all seems to be correct. As these Mesh Strips basically follow the road and the terrain deformation is adjusted you probably want to use "Path Forward" for the Alignment. But I would always recommend to start simple and check the rseults of the various options. Then choose what looks best . You want to use "Snap To Terrain" only on the most outer or most outer two shape nodes, those nodes that actually should snap to the terrain.

Thanks,
Raoul

 

Hi docsavage,

You can export the full road network to .obj and also roads individually.

We use our own terrain system so we are not 100% familiar with how terrain systems like gaia, terrain composer, landscape builder use masks.

In any case, if you let me know what is required to make things easier, please let me know. It is fairly simple to implement an option that will output the road network shape in a texture, this can be done for both the road area only but also for the area affected by the road network (those white surfaces).

Thanks,
Raoul

 

Indeed those mesh strips can make things look a lot better / smoother in hilly areas. But it depends on the situation. It will still be relatively hard to handle steep hairpins on the inner side in very hilly areas.

For sure the generated strips will nicely connect to the road, but the other end, the snapping to the terrain bit depends on what the terrain looks like in that area. More will follow on that, like the option to fully triangulate terrain areas between road edges which is what you would want in this case.

Thanks,
Raoul

 

That sounds like a great project and it sounds like fun when finished. By motorcycle run do you mean it's not done like a race for a prize? I don't think the TT doing 200mph could be classed as a run even if it is going past peoples houses

If you are working with ARGB maps The docs for HorizonOn have a link showing a technique for this. -

. You may be already more advanced than this but will post just in case it can help.

 

I didn't know about the terrain system being build in. Sounds great. Thanks.

 

Raoul. I would like to achieve medieval road mostly so it will be filled out by pebbles and such, but I would like to avoid same width of the road on whole distance so I would like to have thinner or wider parts of it, is there any parameters which I could use to achieve such variety of it ?

 

In the game, being done for Global Wheels and Tail Of The Dragon store and franchise TailOfTheDragon.com I will have 3 modes. Race The Clock which times an unimpeded run, an Obstacle Run with traffic, wildlife wandering into road and a few stunt obstacles like an overturned pickup which the lumber fallen will create a jump ramp and a Bootleggers run where you have to outrun an AI motorcycle cop or get busted.

What I did was this for creating splatmaps.
1. Opened the google maps satellite image in Photoshop as I was using Real World Terrain and they grabbed them when grabbing the heightmaps.
2.Used the Image->Adjustments->Replace Color and sampled the shadows of the slopes.
3.Set Fuzziness = 159, Hue = +113, Saturation = +95 lightness = +25. Clicked OK and this gave me a nicley blended RGB with superfine splat definition and blending bewteen colors.
4.To create the Alpha channel needed for the ARGB32 texture I then used Select->Color Range, Eyedroppered a grey area like the rock or road, set Fuzziness = 116, clicked OK and copied the Selection to the clipboard.
5. Added and Alpha Channel to the image and pasted the selection in and saved as .TIF with Alpha.
6. In Unity is used the Advanced Texture Import, Checked Read/Write Enabled, Wrap Mode to Clamp, Filter Mode to Bilinear, turned off MIP maps, Checked Override For Standalone and chose ARGB 32 bit from the dropdown and hot Apply.

 

Noted on the tight hairpins inside curves, some of which are 270+ degrees over a few tens of metres. I will create short medium and long strips with seamless texturing at the ends of each type of strip.

 

I am assuming from your answer about dirt and rock margins fading to zero that the Transparent shader will not pick up shadows?

 

Thanks for posting that method. Very helpful. I will attempt to use somethnig similar. Recently found out gimp doesn't yet do select by color range but there'll always a way round it.

 

Sorry, I meant that we use our own terrain system and therefor we are not 100% familiat with asset store terrain systems.

Thanks,
Raoul

 

Hi Killersan,

After you hit the N Key (http://unityterraintools.com/EasyRoads3D/v3/html/shortcuts.html) You will see white handles at the left and right side of the road for the selected marker. You can move these handles inwards/outwards to adjust the width per marker.

Thanks,
Raoul

 

You can find a lot on this, https://www.google.com/search?q=uni...oe=utf-8&channel=fs&trackid=sp-006&gws_rd=ssl .

I am keeping an eye on it but as far as I know it is still not supported out of the box.

Thanks,
Raoul

 

Raoul - thank you very much for the replies and help. The reason I was asking was because I was wondering whether it's better to wait for v3 free or to bumble around trying to make my own solution. Since you're saying it's the last steps, I'll simply wait patiently <3

 

Wow, nice work! Good luck)

 

Could you please elaborate further cause I'm getting the same error on unity 5 (win 7).

 

Hi lunar211,

What error is that?

With regard to the dll's, you can check/set the import settings in the Inspector by selecting them one after the other in the project folder. The locations are:

/Assets/EasyRoads3D/Editor/EasyRoads3Dv3Editor
/Assets/EasyRoads3D/lib/EasyRoads3Dv3

Thanks,
Raoul

 

I keep getting this error- "Assets/EasyRoads3D Free/scripts/SideObjectInit.cs(2,7): error CS0246: The type or namespace name `UnityEditor' could not be found. Are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?" I just selected the stand alone checkbox but that does not help.

 

Hi lunar211,

That is v2 (this is the v3 thread ), the error is unrelated to the package dll's. Simply remove that line:

Code (csharp):

1. using UnityEditor;

That should fix it.

This was recently updated for the v2 asset store builds. Did you download from the asset store version or from our website?

Thanks,
Raoul

 

Oddly I downloaded this from the asset store yesterday.... The game compiled but now more error but i feel this has to do with something else. Anyways Thanks for the help and the quick reply

 

Thank you, I will double check the free version download once again.

I see you changed your last post. I was going to ask what you exactly meant with:

What do you mean with "when I try to start it", were you able to create a road and does this happen when you Play the scene? If you need more help, could you please provide full steps. Or do you perhaps have other compilation errors unrelated to EasyRoads3D?

Thanks,
Raoul

 

Hi,

I have problem with blob shadows, blow shadow is not visible in the road ( created by EasyRoads ) however it is visible in terrain. First I I though it is layer selection issue, but it is not. Any idea ?

 

Hi MoribitoMT,

A similar question was recently asked here:

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/ea...g-new-road-system.229327/page-48#post-2691972

See my reply just below the question and the confirmation at the top of this page.

Please let me know if that didn't solve the issue.

Thanks,
Raoul

 

There is a yellow warning on Unity 5.4b23,(last easy road3 beta)

Assets/EasyRoads3D/Editor/ProceduralObjectsEditor.cs(11,15): warning CS0436: The type `ProceduralObjectsEditor' conflicts with the imported type `ProceduralObjectsEditor'. Ignoring the imported type definition

 

Hello ksam2,

There is no such file in v3, is this v2 related?

Could you provide more info? When did you get that message? After a Unity upgrade?
And is that the only warning you get? No errors? In that case it sounds like either the package didn't import well or the imported package conflicts with already existing files perhaps in another location?

This script is related to the Shape Editor window for Shape type of side objects (v2). Does that work well?

Thanks,
Raoul

 

You right, it was an error from v2 and v3 works great without any error or warning.

 

Since you mentioned it was a yellow warning, I think this it isn't really a v2 error either otherwise it would have been displayed in red and stop Unity from compiling the scripts. But I will check the v2 import in 5.4b23.

Thanks,
Raoul

 

Hi raoul,
we just realized that there seem to be some scripts missing on your standart prefabs that ship with this package:
EasyRoads3D v3 Beta 7.7.2.Unity5

• connection_1
• cul-de-sac
• rounded_crossing
• rounded_crossing_original
• standard X crossing 1
• T-Crossing

As follow-up the MeshFilter of each of these prefabs shows "Missing Mesh".

 

Another issue with ER. Unity Editor does not recognize scene changes when road markers are manipulated. Saving the scene has no effect.
Once you leave the scene and return to it the road will be in a state before road markers were manipulated. This issue has cost me a whole day.