Any tutorials on making towns with roads and terrain?

Support Modeling
1

I always wanted to create my own terrains/maps which you can freely explore, like a “tourist” or something. A few years ago I used Sketchup and Cryengine (the sdk for crysis 1) and that was…not that good, but I could make my own island with my own buildings, towns and I used the roads from Crysis itself, I even managed to create a working train on which you could climb onto and ride on it. :slight_smile: After that I also managed to do the same in UE and maybe a few others, however it was Sketchup after all, all cities, buildings, roads,etc. were blocky, filled with ngons, no UV mapping (heck, I didn’t know what that was until recently) and so on…

So, I was inspired by map mods for GTA games like Criminal Russia, French Riviera and some other smaller ones and I want to create something like that, although of course on a much smaller scale. Currently I know how to create terrains and even import terrains from G. Earth to Blender to make them real life sized. I know how to create roads using the nurbs paths, but there are a few things I don’t know.

  1. I don’t know how to make roads “snap” to each other if that is even possible, if I have a intersection made, is there a way to make a nurbs path end in the right place or do I just have to move the nurbs road until it fits into the intersection?

  2. What is the easiest way to make the curves on the edges of the intersections? So not a blocky unrealistic intersection, but a natural one that has the sidewalks bending at the intersections.

  3. If I have a terrain, a wall and large plain surfaces like that, am I supposed to subdivide them a bunch of times and put a bunch of regular sized textures on each of the new faces or can I simply use tiled textures on one large terrain/wall face?

I’ll probably have a lot more questions later, but if anyone has any youtube video ideas that feature these topics, I’d really like to see them. Of course I can probably find a bunch of “dry” technique tutorials on how to do this one thing without opening this topic, but I want to see someone actually making a road/town model and implementing a bunch of tools and so on, but unfortunately most Blender videos focuse on cups, tables and stuff like that, there’s maybe just 2, 3 videos related to roads.

2

Really? No one… Does anyone know at least one answer for the three questions above if nothing else?

3

Hum, indeed finding the right tutorials could be tricky …

About your questions :

1/ with nurbs / curves I don’t think it’s possible. But you can model with a regular mesh + subsurf. Or convert the nurb path to mesh and join them manually.
Maybe you can also look into the skin modifier that can have non regular scale.

2/ not sure to get what you’re asking , but maybe look into the curve deform modifier, the workflow could be then like this :

Make roads with curves
duplicate them, convert to mesh, -> skin modifier.
use the remaining curve to deform elements that goes on the side of the road.

3/ you can map a textures using both ways you mentioned , it depends on how you’ve unwarped your mesh. You can even map the texture without UVs

There is an addon that can import openstreetmap maps, and can generate roads and buidlings. Could be interesting to get a basis.

This kind of stuff is a bit tricky to make without an addon that do the work for you. But you can still look a bit into it, there are many options but you may need to find your own solution by yourself.

4

There’s an addon to create cities, just search youtube for blender and city, you will see several results. You will need to extrude parts of it, but it will add in curved roads, etc.