Indent Road Into Landscape?

Support Modeling
1

Hi All,

I have a sphere with a displace modifier on it. The displace is controlled by a procedural texture.

I have a curve that I want to use as a road. I am using the shrinkwrap modifier, in projection mode, to conform the curve to the sphere.

My question is how do I indent the displace so it synchronizes where the curve falls?

As I type this, I realize it may be better to use an image map instead of a procedural texture for the displace, but even with an image map I still need to know how project the mapping from the road into a texture?

I have attached an image to show the quality of the projection I am getting out of Blender, not that great.

Any tips or tutorial links would be a great help.

Thanks!

Attachments

bad_projection.jpg1024×431 44.1 KB

2

perhaps using a boolean modifier would help, I’m not too sure what you want to do, could you please post a .blend file.

3

Here is an example of the shrinkwrap modifier failing.

There is an open curve, a closed curve and a nurbs curve in the scene. As you can see none of them work.

I thought Shrinkwrap was a solidly tested modifier? This seems like a basic test, project over a sphere…

What is wrong?
Why won’t my road appear on the surface of the sphere?

Attachments

shrinkwrap_road_problem.blend (438 KB)

4

I took the curve and converted it to a mesh object ( alt + c ), which automatically applied the shrink modifier. Then I went into the edit mode of the “road” and selected all the vertices ( a ) and then extruded them ( e ) by 0.1 BU (blender units). I’ve attached the .blend file of how I did it.

I hope it fixes your problem.

5

Thanks for taking a look at my BLEND file. I was hoping to keep my road in an editable format, not a fixed in stone solution.

I converted the road to a mesh without the shrinkwrap modifer then applied the shrinkwrap modifier to the converted mesh. This failed as well.

I guess the shrinkwrap modifer does not work with an beveled curve correctly. The offset parameter does not seem to do anything usefull. Positive and negative have little/no effect. This modifier is in pretty bad shape as far as project mode for meshes go.

6

What about using retopo?

7

I’d like to chime in saying I’m also disillusioned by the shrinkwrap modifier - I find its very limited. The shrinkwrap constraint is also a bit rough.

For this particular project, I’d use a texture anyways, as per this technique : http://www.cgcookie.com/articles/2008/12/21/blender-intro-to-stencil-maps.

There’s a tutorial somewhere that uses that technique to make a road, but I can’t find it. And yeah, its a destructive editing process - but it takes just a few seconds to paint on a new road.