QUESTION Track Topology

[CalRoHa]

Hi,

I have been trying to build a track for a while now.

I have the road down and understand that process and have tried a few different methods, for this one I went with manually placing planes rather than creating a path.

But what struggling with is the connection of the road to the inside and outside of the track.
the topology just seems like a mess. I have seen screenshots with nice looking edge loops and connections.

I have attached a screenshot of my track currently. The textures are a placeholder for now but I feel like the messy topology isn't helping.

Maybe I am just going about it all wrong.

 

[Rob Pawn]

to avoid the edges you need just more vertices.
and to make a smooth landscape around, you can use "shade smooth" in blender. it will optically bend the edges a bit... (for example when you have a hill with less vertices)

 

[Mitch9]

afaik there´s no universally "good" topology; it depends on the use case and in this context it means you have no shading artifacts and the driveable parts don´t feel too coarse - quads or tris is kind of irrelevant here. its not like you are going to animate that terrain... are you?
Looking at the picture, you might want to merge some inner loops and space them more evenly here and there but without knowing the elevation of your track its hard to tell if it really needs anything done to it.
Take a look at other good tracks (kunos etc) to see how they go about it.

 

[Ryno917]

Why not use a path? It would simplify all of this.

With the path, you can make the grass verges at the edge of the road nice and consistent with clean topology. Once you have the immediate surroundings built you can go in and manually do the rest of the terrain with topology that is tailored to the specific needs of the terrain you're trying to build. It'd also be linked to your path still, so you can make changes to the path to tweak the circuit if needed.


What you have here is far, far, far too low resolution for a modern game like AC. My visual road mesh has approximate 1 meter segments along the length. Flat straights can have less, tighter corners may need more. Physics mesh is much finer than that even.