W.I.P. Tarn country road

[ArthB]

Hey there !

First post, first mod. I'm really new to this, but here goes. I'm gonna document my progress here. Also be advised I am working with Maya, and I see so little tuts or stuff for maya users on the modding forums, so maybe some of the methods I use can benefit other maya users hopefully !

This is a semi-real world road, located in the south of France ( The layout is real but the road camber, elevation and so forth are not ).

Here is a quick preview of where I am at so far. The textures are garbage, they are just placeholders. And the posts on the side are just here to help get a sense of speed since the road isn't shaded. Anyway I'm really trying to nail the feeling of the road before moving to the aesthetics.

Cheers !

 

[luchian]

Hi @ArthB , welcome to the modding world .

It's great to see people inspired and starting projects. It's exactly the purpose of the site.
Look forward to seeing how this evolves (I agree that there aren't that many Maya tuts out there.. I may have come across a few, but didn't always published them). Hopefully this will change .

Have fun, keep us posted.

 

[ArthB]

Hey luchian !

I've been lurking your threads and posts, thank you for helping others

I'm probably gonna work some hours on it tomorrow, so maybe I'll update the tread then. I might also put together a maya tutorial when I'll have the track completed.

 

[ArthB]

Quick little update !



I've been working on improving the road and the roadside. It now has a proper trench like french roads do, which makes for nice crashes if you're too adventurous and venture offroad at speed

If things go smoothly I'll be able to put out an alpha version for you guys to check it out, I'd love to hear your feedback.

Cheers !

 

[LilSKi]

Hard to tell but looks a bit high on poly count for the road/edges length wise and also in the width of the road.

 

[ArthB]

Hard to tell but looks a bit high on poly count for the road/edges length wise and also in the width of the road.

Yeah I'm still trying to figure out the best way to build roads in maya. I find it really hard to do it with the tools that are provided compared to what I see in Blender.

Basically my workflow is as follows :
- Import the image plane of my layout and proceed to draw the curve along it
- Create a straight curve to be extruded as the road surface along the curve
- Constrain it as a motion path. Basically it's going to animate the profile to slide along the curve ( it uses parametric coordinated, start being 0, end being 1)
- I generate a cache of this animation, which means that it dupplicates the profile curve at every specific frame interval
- I then loft all of the road profiles to create the road surface

By keeping the history I can then change the elevation by moving the layout curve CVs vertically and rotate the profil curves to tweak camber. This is the advantages of the method. The downsides are that the tesselation tools to convert the road surface are shit, that it creates ugly UVs that are a pain to work with. Also once you subdivide and use a map for the bump it's really really heavy on the CPU and GPU.

I'm really considering writing a tool just for that purpose since I'm getting better at python these days. Or switching to blender. I feel like it shouldn't be this hard, I'm getting better at doing it in maya incrementally but it's baby steps.