I need to make a still scene in which there is an asphalt road, pavement, arrows painted on the road, road signs and of course cars, buildings etc.
So it is mixed 3D and 2D and I have a question concerning 2D part (asphalt road with arrows and pavement, and some lawn too). This is all flat 2D and on the same surface. How to approach this? Is it better to draw it directly in Blender using 2D planes, circles etc and give it textures, or is it better to prepare the vector graphics in other 2D software and then import and just map to a big plane object? How such project is usually done? I think it would look better when prepared in Blender, but not sure.
Second question: suppose do it all in Blender.How to draw 2D figures which are in the same vertical surface, i.e. flat? There is a Z-fighting and they don’t render well, some are visible as only black. My question is again, how is it usually dealt with, e.g. the most bottom plane should have e.g. Z =0, then the asphalt road e.g. Z= 0.001, then arrow painted on asphalt Z=0.002 etc ? This is really a lot of hassle, to manually keep track of all objects stacking. In 2D graphics software it is solved by layers stacking and all objects are visible with correct colors. Is there any method in Blender other than the above ? And most important, is it the correct approach to such project at all?
there is a plugin ( for 2.49 I think ) that can use vector images for textures. I think it was called ‘vectortex’, or ‘vectex’ or something like that. the author is ‘macauno’ ( not sure about the spelling ). I think he was using Inkscape to do his textures. He had a thread with some examples mapped onto a humanoid mesh.
Also, you can layer texture channels, so if you have four image textures with alpha channels, your layers will align in the order you stacked your texture channels. just click on ‘use alpha’ to activate the transparency.
It seems that the plugin would be almost exactly what I need. But as you said it is for 2.4, at least from google code repository. Unfortunately I use 2.5 and 2.4x is too messy interface to learn again now. Being able to use vector patterns as textures instead of bitmap patterns would be wonderful.
I thought that maybe it would be possible to create the vector pattern inside Blender 2.5 and then somehow map it to a texture. E.g. create a blue circle mesh as the pattern. Then create a plane and make this plane all dotted with the repeating pattern - the blue circle. But in the texture types, there is nothing like “Existing mesh”, only generated patterns or bitmap images.