EasyRoads3D v2 is out – Road, rivers, procedural geometry for Unity

Hiya,

I have just started using EasyRoads3D and it's great! Should save me a lot of time, once I have worked out how to use it

I have a question about Bridges. I am unable to get them working. When I select a marker I am unable to tick the Bridge box.

What am I doing wrong?

 

Hi,

You are doing nothing wrong. This is a problem related to Unity 3.5 GUI changes. It will be fixed in the next update.

Meanwhile you may want to have a look in the folder and open /EasyRoads3D/Editor/MarkerEditorScript . Do a search for markerScript.bridgeObject and you will see this line:

Code (csharp):

1. markerScript.bridgeObject = EditorGUILayout.Toggle (markerScript.bridgeObject, GUILayout.Width(10));

Increase the width to something like GUILayout.Width(25)

You will have the same issue with for example “Start New LOD Segment”. The above will fix this.

 

Hi raoul,
I purchased your product yesterday because i saw all these youtube videos showing these new features you have made, but it appears the features i was looking for, such as raise terrain, and digging roads into the ground to create tunnels. i saw that intersecting was in beta. my question is, is the raise terrain and digging tunnels in the beta? is this something i must upgrade to pro to get?

 

Hi Raoul.

Yesterday I've bought your nice tool for use to draw fences (and rocks and future goodies).

I now need to create the fences. I am trying to use the side objects. I thought I need to use the procedural object and have the posts of the fences as start and end objects and the ropes that connect them as the connection object.
I could not get this to work. The fences is not drawn.

When using the import mesh object it works fairly well although the rotation is not always correct.

My main need is the procedural object placing.

What am I doing wrong?

 

Hi gtidhar,

I responded to this same question you sent by email and just saw your reply in which you asked what I meant with:

with "dray", I mean "draw", apologies!

A connection object is not an object that connects start end objects. Connection objects are objects that will be instantiated for each row of vertices. Use the same fence post prefab as the connection object and you will see they will be instantiated at every x m distance. I am not sure what your fence looks like but the shape of what you described as "the ropes", should be drawn in the geometry editor window as a 2D shape. For a regular fence this usually involves 2 nodes, one at the bottom at (0,0) and one at the fence height, for example at (0, 3). In the editor the 2 nodes will connect. If you enable this side object in the scene you will see that the fence is generated according the spline path through the marker positions and this 2D shape.

Did you have a look at the demo project? it includes an example of a fence.

Let me know if you have further questions.

 

Hi,

Yes, intersections is in beta. support for tunnels etc is not in beta, it is on the list of features to implement.

 

The bootcamp fence from the demo is one mesh consisting of two fence polls connected with wood in between to make a closed fence section.
Our fence has a poll mesh and rope mesh that we connect to the poll on one side and then add another poll on the other side. This makes a fence section, and this way our fence does not have redundant polls (no two polls near each other. Always a rope mesh connecting them.

I am wondering if I can use this to achieve that in the easyroads tool.

 

The manual mentions a Delete Marker tool, but i do not see it in the list, i am in editing mode for the object.

also when i select Bridge Object, it doesnt appear to actually create the bridge geometry, this is from a brand new install of 2.4.3, by default its no tworking.... and yes i did the fix for the checkbox, i can get the check box and all functions to work properly, but the bridge geometry and textures are not showing.

I have selected, bridge concrete, bridge pillar, bridge left, and bridge right.

i also have left wall, right wall, left fence,right fence, and only the bridge objects dont show up , even when i click play. and yes i have processed the terrain when i test.

PLease check that this is not an error with the newest version. i do see it working in the demo scene tho.

also i am not using the first 2 nodes, i am using the 3rd with distributed height, then 4th does not have diestributed height, just bridge, then the 5th has destributed height , and the street is in mid air, with no bridge side objects visible at all.

 

I can't have a look at the moment, is the bootcamp fence the only fence in the side object package? Is the chainlink fence from the demo project not included? That is the one that looks similar to what you need...

 

Raoul it appears that the mesh for bridge objects are blank, from selected "side objects" from the heiarchy , the rest show either "combined" or "none" but that one has no name, and when u double click, it shows an object with 9000 verticles, but no triangles, and no uv.

it looks fine, in the object manager for sides, , and i do see the prefab for bridgepilarprefab, and it does have the box01 mesh. so its all there, but when used in the road it just never appears

 

I don't see the "chainlink" in the demo assets.

 

Did you look at the demo project? The chainlink fence as seen in the side objects demo movie on our website should be in there in exactly the same example scene. Otherwise you may just look at for example the walls side object. Open the procedural geometry editor window. You will see the wall 2D shape. You can experiment with moving adding nodes and see how changing the shape affects the geometry shape of the side object in the scene.

A simple fence is just a matter of drawing 2 vertical nodes in the geometry editor and using a post as the connection object. Set "distance" in the general side object settings to the distance between 2 posts. You can add the fence material in the geometry editor or in the Inspector by selecting the side object in the hierarchy. Hope this helps...

 

I am back now and had a look...

The example bridge elements in the side object package are by default disabled for each marker. Can you select the road markers that are part of the bridge and double check if "Display Object" is enabled for each bridge element. You can select each bridge element from the drop down box.

They are named "Left Fence", "Right Fence" (copied from the demo project).

 

Raoul,

I am having an issue with the Default Indent setting. I started by setting this to 11 but have found that I am then unable to make this any smaller on each section, so I have now changed the default to 4. This works for a while but then it seems to reset back to 11 and I lose any custom indents.

Hope that makes sense. Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong?

 

There is a minimum allowed value for the left and right indents. It is based on your terrain size and heightmap resolution. This minimum value ensures that the terrain will be deformed accurately near the road. A minumum value of 11 seems high. What is your terrain size and heightmap resolution?

 

The terrain is 2000 x 2000 units and the heightmap resolution is only 257. I chose this resolution as I want to try to get this working on mobiles so didn't want too much detail.

 

2000x2000 at heightmap resolution 257 means there is a distance of about 8 meters between terrain points. EasyRoads3D adds a small margin to this to make sure that the terrain is also deformed correctly when the road passes through terrain points diagonally. This explains why you cannot use lower indent values then 11. The road will either float above the terrain or the terrain will pop through the road when using lower indent values.

Are you using the terrain object for mobile or do you export the terrain to a mesh? If you export the terrain you may consider using a higher heightmap resolution and optimize the mesh in a modeling app. Depending on the feature set of the upcoming polygon reduction plugin of bibbinator. This may soon be possible to do all in Unity.

 

I think as you say it may be better for me to up the heightmap resolution and then export the mesh into 3dsMax and optimise it from there.

I have changed it to 513 for now and shall see how that look.

Thanks

 

I have another problem that seems to happen sometimes. I have added a second road to my scene and this was working okay for a while but now it won't update in the viewport in realtime. When I move the markers the indent mesh moves, but the road doesn't. I have also lost the indent size options from the Inspector window.
My original road still seems to work okay, although this did do the same thing earlier but seems to have fixed itself.
Any ideas raoul?

 

Yes, depending on the nature of your terrain and game you may even experiment with an heightmap resolution of 1025 for optimal detail near the road. Let me know if you have further questions.

UPDATE: Seems we posted around the same time...

Not sure, there should not be any issue using multiple roads in a scene. With "Move", do you mean the white surfaces update correctly? What happens when you reload the scene? And what do you mean with "You lost the indent options in the Inspector?". Do you get error messages?

 

I can move the white surface, but the road mesh doesn't move. And when I select one of the markers in the Hierarchy view I don't have any options for it in the Inspector window. Things like the 'Marker: #' and 'Marker Settings' where I can change the left and right indent size. They do have the Marker Script component attached though.

Opening up the scene this morning an it is still the same.

 

Do you mean all custom editor GUI elements have gone including the EasyRoads3D toolbar and instead you see a bunch of vars? If so, does it say "Missing Monobehaviour" at the top of this component?

 

I have tried to post a couple of images to better show what I mean by the missing information. For the road that updates, 'Road_QuarryPath', when I select one of the markers I have options to change the indent size among other things. But on my new road 'Road_Fake01' when I select a marker I don't have these options. This is the road that doesn't deform in realtime.

For now I will just make this road again, as it didn't take long. Was just wondering if you knew what it could be, or what I had done.

UPDATE: I just added a new marker to the broken road and this seems to have fixed it. The road moves when I move the marker, and the settings in the Inspector window have returned.
Not sure what happened there.

 

And you didn't get any error messages when that happened?

Anyway, glad you sorted this out...

 

No error message. Just seemed to sort itself out.

 

ok i found "Display object" that is weird i dont understand why i can see it now, but not when the option for setting the bridge object checkbox, its very confusing

 

this is not good, if i make a long bridge, it takes forever to turn on dispaly object for pillar, bridge left, bridge right, bridge concrete, per marker

 

ok i see now why they are off by default, in case you make 1 really long road, you don't want to display the bridge, i will suggest that, if you want to leave bridge concrete off that sfine, but you should be able to identify if a bridge marker is higher than the terrain, then you display the bridge pillar. that part be automated. i understand the bridge left and bridge right thing tho.

 

“Active Side Objects” in General Settings of the main EasyRoads3D object lists all availables ide objests in a Unity project. Here you can enable/disable side objects in general for a specific EasyRoads3D object..

“Display Object” is a marker setting. It turns on/off the selected side object for the selected marker. For road / river objects these options are visible after rendering the road / deforming the terrain.

In the Side Object Manager you can enable / disable whether a side object is by default on or off for each marker. Indeed, imagine a road with 100 markers and you have a bridge covering 3 markers. You will have to turn off 97 markers if it would be turned on by default. So for each side object it is a matter of how this will be used in the scene and enable/disable the default marker setting accordingly.

It seems you got everything sorted out regarding this. Otherwise let me know!

 

if i turn on multiple roads setting, does this make it so that the terrain will be edittable at all, or must i turn off all roads before editting the terrain.

 

Multiple Roads? Or do you mean Mulitple Terrains in General Settings? What exactly are you trying to do?

If you want to manually edit the terrain, make sure all roads are in "Edit Mode" otherwise you will lose your changes when returning to Edit Mode. Alternatively you can actually edit the terrain and use the respective Terrain back up option from the EasyRoads3D top menu to store your changes. When you go back to Edit Mode the terrain changes will be lost but you can restore the changes using the backup you just made. However, when you do backup the terrain it will overwrite the original backup file! You may want to backup the initial backup first so you can always fall back on that one! You can find the back up by selecting the terrain. In the inspector you will see a component with a terrain id variable. This id refers to:

Your project folder > EasyRoads3D > terrain id folder

In this folder you will find all backup files.

 

I have no such objects on my project.

What example scene? I have none.

I am new to your tool. Please try and direct me to what I actually need to do in order to access all that you mention.

Are you referring to the Object Manager?
1. How would I draw 2 vertical nodes? I don't seem to find such an option (if I'm at the right place)
2. There is no "distance". There is "Distance Sideways" and "Face Distance".

 

HI gtidhar, with regard to the demo project etc. did you purchase through the assetstore? In this case, have a look in the EasyRoads3D folder of the package you downloaded, it includes a readme file. That will get you started with the first 2 questions.

In the Object Manager you can select the type of side object.:

1. Instantiated Objects: Use this for, for example, lampposts, trees, rocks, etc. Mesh objects that you want to position according the spline path.

2. Prodecural Object: This object type will create procedural meshes based on the shape you can draw in the editor window. When you select this option you will see a new button "Geometry Editor". This will open the editor window. By double clicking, you can add points. The points will connect. Afterwards, you can select points and move them etc. Use this sysem to create a 2D representation of the object. The side object will be procedurally created along the spline according this 2D shape.

"Face Distance" is the one you need to to set the distance between posts. "Distance Sideways" refers to a fixed distance to the left or right of the markers. If you create a "Procedural Mesh Object" (no road or river object) you should keep this at 0. For road objects however the marker will be in the middle of the road. If you put the "Distance Sideways" at 3, the fence will be positioned 3 meters on the right of the middle of the road.

Let me know if you have further questions!

 

Thanks!
I have downloaded the demo project.
What I am missing is the "Chain link" you have mentioned. Note I have emailed you an image explaining exactly what I am trying to create. I think the missing chain link (kind of a pun right there), is what we need. At least to be able to play with it as an example.

 

Yes, I just replied to your email. The Chainlink fence is called "Fence Left", "Fence Right" in both the demo project and side objects package. As I also wrote in the email, if you still need more help, you can also send me the pole mesh object and textures, and I will create the side object for you so you can instantly use it in your scenes...

 

Hi Raoul,

I keep getting this error:

I can't seem to link it to one specific action, it just pops up every 10 minutes or so..

Also, and I don't know if this is linked, I have a problem with multiple roads on one terrain, and their render materials. The materials on different roads seem to swap with other ones, and sometimes selecting the road and then the correct material doesn't work. Re-rendering the road is then the only thing that works.


Lastly, I have some suggestions on how to improve Easyroads. I have been using it for some time now, and made about 10 levels with this tool,

The first and formost thing I'd really like to see a Lock Road Render checkbox; when checked, the road doesn't de-render automaticly.

Last thing I think would make EasyRoads better, is the ability to connect different roads to each other. I realize you are working on crossroads, so maybe you already thought about incorporating that feature, but that would certainly speed up the Dev process. When I wanted to widen a piece of road I had to go to a whole lot of trouble to fix that, with the above mentioned feature you could just make another road, set it at a 150% width, and connect it.


I don't want to come off as negative with this bug and suggestions though Easyroads is a great tool, and really helped me out developping fun tracks! A must for anyone building race games in Unity!

 

Now, I also get this error:

This one

Also, again not knowing if this is related to the errors, Im working on a Height map in Photoshop. I just imported the heightmap into Unity, for a terrain with 2 roads on it. No matter what I do, one of the roads is not rendering it's changes to the terrain. Previously when I imported a heigtmap for a terrain with roads on it, I'd back up all terrain data before continuing working on the roads, wich seemed to work correctly.. Now it seems to not take into account the changes the different roads make to the height-map, always ignoring either one of the two roads' changes..

This bug, plus the material-swapping one mentioned above are driving me a bit crazy How do I fix this?? I can't finish my Beta untill this is resolved..

 

Hi Thomas,

Regarding the error messages. It is difficult to say what is going wrong without more info. The more so as you say that you have been using EasyRoads3D for a while without these errors. Which version are you currently using? Did you upgrade to 2.4.4 which was released recently? If so, is this happening since the upgrade? Would it be possible to send me the project or a sample project so I can reproduce this?

The second error message in your second post is probably the result of the first error message. What happens when you import EasyRoads3D in a fresh project?

In v2, indeed the same road material is used for each road. If you want to use different materials simply duplicate the road material, swap textures and assign it to the roads but do this when you are finished because the roads use different materials in “Edit Mode” and “Rendered Mode” so it will override materials you manually assigned to it.

This should not happen unless you have played the scene, is that correct? When you play the scene all original terrain data stored in memory is lost After playing the scene EasyRoads3D restores all data from a backup stored on disk. This is primarly intended to make sure the terrain doesn’t lose its original height data. Let’s say you want to change the shape of the road at a specific marker position. In that case you do not want to have the previous road shape still visible in the terrain. Restoring the terrain etc. prevents this. So, things are actually intended to work like that during the process of building a road. But if there is demand for this I can make this “optional” behaviour.

Can you send me screenshots of this? Are the roads near each other where the bleeding occurs?

Both widen a piece of road as reducing / increasing lanes which requires more work on uvs and materials etc. are on the list to incorporate.

I am eager to figure out what is causing the error message so I hope you can send me a (optionally stripped down) project or give more information so I can reproduce this.


Thanks,
Raoul

 

Hi Raul I also get this error

The process was to get the error was:

1. Create new EasyRoads project, it then prompts me to update to newest version
2. Add some markers and create a new procedural side object created using "Edit Geometry"
3. Activate side objects, build side objects and create terrain

I have send an example project

cheers

 

Thank you Matt for the info! Did you send the project to my email address? I didn't receive it yet...

The error message is related to building side objects.

I just double checked things myself in a completely fresh project following the steps you mentioned. I created several procedural side objects types with for instance markers by default disabled and enabled. Also tested this with "Auto create Side Objects" in the "General Settings" tab turned on and off. I do not get error messages and the side objects are generated correctly.Hopefully I can reproduce this with your sample project...

Did you indeed download and upgrade to 2.4.4? If so, do you have the same problems in a new project with a fresh install of v2.4.4?

Thanks,
Raoul

 

Hi Sorry my hotmail address which I was registered from isn't attaching the project for some reason so sent it from the work one
cheers. Its one the mac version dunno if that makes a diff

 

Thanks, I received it!

I found the problem. You are using a value of -1 for "Distance Sideways", which means that this side object is following the road 1m at the left of the centre of the road. This exact value of -1 is causing a conflict. Open the side object manager, change the Sideways Distance value to -1.1 or any float value other than -1, select "Update all markers in all EasyRoads3D Object" from the dropdown box and save the side object. The side object should now be generated correctly. I will fix the issue with -1!

 

I just mailed you a test project, sorry, had a busy weekend

Good to see that one of the bugs has been identified already!

 

Raoul your still at it ehh? lol!

 

@ThomasQ, Got your project. I see 3 roads in the scene, 2 were already in rendered mode. I restored them, which will happen from stored backup files when you saved a scene in this state. Then I rendered them again and after a while I noticed that when putting terrains back to edit mode in a different order then how you rendered them it raises errors. So obviously the code dealing with that is broken. I will fix that!

@Adrenaline Crew, yes I am, I see you changed your website, looks good!

 

This is just to let you know that v2.4.5, with fixes for above issues, is now available. The Assetstore version is pending review...

 

I have a strange bug.

My computer has several windows users. I've created a scene with one road. When I open this scene using one windows account - I can see the road mesh (blue triangles), but I couldn't see road texture which should be mapped to this mesh.
When I log in to system by all other of my computer accounts (and open this unity scene) I could see the mesh and the texture on it - all is Ok.

May be this problem is well known, but I have not know about it yet?

 

The generated road object is an ordinary gameobject with a meshfilter and meshrenderer attached. Can you have a look in the Inspector at the material attached to the MeshFilter. What shader is the Material using and which texture? Does this material work well on another game object like a primitive cube for that specific user account? Btw.I have not heard about issues with multiple user accounts on a single machine before.

 

just bought the pro version and you say in the description that we can have access to beta.

where do i go to downloads betas?

The game i'm trying to do require square corners and intersection, so i would love to be able to test that out right now event if there is a risk that i have to place my roads again when 3.0 is out.

do you have a ETA for 3.0?

thanks!