Just started using Blender in anger (version 2.76) and enjoying it.
The learning curve is a little steep but I have the 3d concepts down from when I was studying with 3ds Max and Maya at school, but I’m old now and that was many years ago :evilgrin:
Anyway, first post and I’m hoping for some help.
Watching this video…
I’ve been trying to follow this guy making a race track from bezier curves and the cool way of making the track follow a path (shown here https://youtu.be/3481ueuDJwQ?t=5m50s).
Unfortunately, the video quality is not too great and there’s no commentary (plus he seems to know his way very well around Blender and moves pretty quick ).
I have tried to replicate this myself by making a simple race track image in GIMP and exporting it as an SVG.
Now I have imported it into Blender and I can convert it into a mesh and then extrude it, but I would really like to build a track like the video where it is like he can have a surface follow the path.
I don’t need a textured surface like he has, just looking for a flat surface that I will eventually convert to a mesh to import into a game I am (trying) building.
It’s not hard. One way is to use ‘images as planes’ addon to bring in a texture, that puts the plane it’s mapped to have the same aspect ratio. Then replicate it along the curve
I recorded the screen to show the steps. I first used the curve itself and textured that.
At 2:55 I’m enabling two options on the curve which are for curve deform modifier. One is to stretch the geometry along the whole curve, and another is to have it stop at the bounds. That makes the start and end points easier to match and faster to set up.
Yes, that’s what the second method in the video does. It’s a mesh with four vertices, which gets duplicated many times to match the length of the curve, and finally deformed by the curve.
Images as planes addon just makes the process faster. Without it you would have to
get the image in the scene as background image
add a plane and move its vertices to match
unwrap it, preserving the aspect ratio of the image
add a material and a material assigned texture
Then it’s ready to be set to go along the curve, last part being optional if you don’t export materials and textures.
The addon comes with Blender so might as well use it.
There’s a difference between objects and object data, object data being mesh in this case. Modifiers manipulate object data, and you do the same in edit mode. In object mode you manipulate different objects as a whole, their transforms. Array and curve modifiers do not array nor deform objects.
So in a way you’re asking if it’s possible to use a plane primitive object to follow the curve. Answer to that is yes, but it wouldn’t be very useful to have a piece of track going around the curve on its own, and having multiple of those next to each other wouldn’t be nice either because there would be gaps between them.
Approximating curves and curved surfaces as a mesh need more geometry than straight lines and flat surfaces. The array is used to have more geometry which can deform around the curved parts on the deforming helper curve, and also maps the small strip of the track on each of the pieces at the same time.
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