QUESTION Roadside Terrain (Blender)

[Toastur]

Hello!

I've been working on my track for a while, but one thing I've always been unsure about is doing the terrain that's immediately next to the road. My current method to make some bit of the terrain, then array/curve it along with the main road then "sew" it by shinkwrapping a vertex group made up of the edge of the terrain to the road to fill any gaps.

However as you can imagine, this has its limitations which would take some time to fix (not that that's much of an issue) and I was wondering if anyone here may have some pointers or better ways to go about this, maybe even helpful add-ons. This is my first track so I'm open to any and all advice/criticism.

Thanks!

(Sorry if something like this has been asked already, I looked around for quite a bit but most of the stuff I came across was either for 3DS or was just mentioned with no pictures/details.)

 

[ElectroEsper]

Been hoping for some answers here as well, Any tips and tricks, or "Best practices".

 

[Ryno917]

I just create the grass and array it around the same curve as the road surface. Using the same 'depth' the verts should be 100% aligned to your road surface. Depending on the topology of the surrounding terrain, I'll make that between 5-20 meters wide. I'll then apply the array modifier and add a few edge loops along the length of the circuit, and progressively "checker deselect" and "collapse" edges to reduce poly count further away from the track. Pretty much all of the terrain between the asphalt and walls is on the curve. I'll manually adjust in Z if I don't want the height to follow, or manually narrow some areas as necessary to fit the intended topology.

 

[luchian]

Hi. I like clean geometry, so this is what I usually do (I don't know if it can be called good practice, but works for me).

Once I am finished with my visual road, I use it as a base to also generate the geometry next to it.
I use this small addon: https://blenderartists.org/t/offset-edges/584283/335. It will add a new command in the CTRL+E menu, namely Offset Extrude.

Edit mode
Select edge loop
Offset extrude (3 times)
Delete the middle one
Disolve edges on the one further from the road (in order to gradually reduce geometry).
Bridge Edge Loops.

I made a short video:

You can repeat this process as many times you feel needed.
You can then separate road from terrain.

LE: Haha, I see @Ryno917 also posted in the meantime . Indeed, some manual corrections might be needed in the tight corners, otherwise geometry might overlap.