As my newborn son (as of the 11th) sleeps in the room adjacent, I find myself with a strange surplus of time I'm not accustomed to during this period of the night. I've been doing 'game guru daddy time' with my son though religiously and one thing that's remained constant is his love of roads.
He's set me up to be prepared for something I've wanted to do for a while and it's making pretty good progress. Screenshot below:
These are some custom normal-mapped 1024x1024 roads which can be used on the fly to simply *DRAW* a road. A lot of the models I have for roads are from TGC's city pack which, while useful, is a total bastard to work with in terms of making roads. You're constantly struggling with the problem of snapping them together, making them seamless, getting elevations consistent - not to mention the terrain issue of 'rolling hills' makes them impossible for use.
There's other, probably better, products on the store - namely from "Valuable Assets" but I don't want to shell out 8 dollars for something I can whip out on my own. Once I verify all the licensing and final texture usages I'll put something up at a lowish price (4-6 dollars?).
I've basically got as of current a series of 'muddy splotchy grass' which looks good with vegetation on it:
Now these are textures I've gotten from the web, built normals for, tweaked, etc. But I need to verify if they're cool to drop on the store or if I need to find more license-friendly ones first. For now, personal use will do. After that, I intend to build some simple 'road line' decals for putting lines on the road.
Simple solution to a simple problem, right?
As you can see, a simple asphalt road runs off through some trees, up a valley to the top of a hill. It has a gentle slope and looks true enough. This is simply not something you can easily do with a hard model of a road. I literally threw this scene together in less than five minutes, so with some touching up it could really be something good!
