Don't forget these for the horribly maintained backroads, with potholes here and there...horrible patch jobs, bumps everywhere, and those kind of bad road features, @AIM!
Ah yes, my bad I must have missed it in my haste. --- Post updated --- Yes, those will be coming soon! I will put them sort of as backroads along the highway! Would you like to make me that texture? Then it could be exactly what you want.
Work on this map has NOT ended, I have just been quite busy and have run into some collision issues considering I am not skilled in blender, and I use Sketchup and Autodesk Inventor 2017. If you have any suggestions feel free to suggest
Yes, I just import them into Blender as a .obj and then export as a .dae, and then import that into sketchup and texture it. Autodesk is nice for indepth models with lots of details and curves etc.
Static object progress: It has been a busy couple weeks, but I have gotten quite a bit done. I had a huge breakthrough with collisions, and so it took some time to redo some of those and get everything functioning properly. I also was able to create a new overpass model to use as a bridge, which I probably made like 10 models which didn't work... so now I am just adding small details to the model to make it more realistic. I also developed an airport 3d model, but I am not sure if I like it or not, so I would like you to express your opinions on it. I am considering creating a separate model for the runway or something, I am not entirely sure yet. I will see. The airport is quite large and I have a bridge going over the Three Lane Highway, and right after the bridge ends, there is a short exit for the airport. I did create a sign for the exit to the airport or a continue down the road into a tunnel that will be added soon. I am hoping to loop the tunnel around to somewhere, tbd. Terrain Progress: In some areas, my highways are very hilly, so I have been really focusing my work on making sure my roads are drivable for all vehicles. I have been using Mesh Roads to sculpt out the terrain, so it isn't hard, it is just extremely time consuming and rather annoying. On the road to the airport parking, there is a raised road that is nice and smooth. Soon I will add a guardrail all around, but that will be last. Some of the three lane highway is still very lumpy and not well mended together. The start is 100% smooth, although when I started, I did separate Mesh Roads for Westbound and Eastbound, so now there is a bit section of high terrain in the middle. I will hopefully remove that and smooth nice medians in the middle. Vegetation Progress: I have not added ANY trees, grasses, or plants of any sort to the map yet. I am hoping to create some custom weeds and plants for the medians and around the river (Which needs updating). I am not really familiar with vegetation creation considering blender is used to create it, so I will be looking for any easier way to create it. Some may say impossible, but I say possible. Overall this map has a lot of open space to be filled, and is far from done. I have made a lot of progress and quite honestly I am proud of what I have done. I am still having some issues with my decal road textures, which I am sure I will figure it out somehow. --- Post updated --- Pictures coming soon! (Like as soon as Beam is done updating)
Hello all! This thread has been dead for a while, but I have decided to continue work on this map and I am determined to finish it, or get it to a state where it can be published. Thanks to @bob.blunderton I have completely renovated my road textures and now they look supreme! I also came to the conclusion that my highway was way too hilly, highways are generally rather flat, usually only getting hilly when completely necessary, even then they aren't that bad. You know that when your going 30mph and you get air, you need to fix something. Another thing that has been holding me back is my static object progress. I am not very good at using blender, and I just don't have the time to learn how to use it properly. So, I use Sketchup. Good, but sometimes not good enough. Sketchup has worked fine so far for making curbs, retaining walls, and manhole covers and such, but when it comes to creating and texturing complex structures like houses and shops, it becomes extremely difficult. I have also tried using Autodesk Inventor Pro 2017 but that has such complex modeling capability, sometimes circular objects won't even load in Beam. Square objects work fine, but tubular things don't. I am going to begin exploring how to take Sketch to the next level, but until then, static obkect progress won't be going anywhere. I am going to post some pictures soon, but until then I will still be working.
I did some re-skins of the ECA models in my /art/shapes/buildings/eca folder, townblocks and filler-walls got plenty of re-skins. So that might give you a boost on houses. Get your road network done 1st. Curbs can be found in INDUSTRIAL map. "IND_CURB", there's 8 or so of them in there + a concrete floor I made the sidewalks in my map out of mostly mesh roads, which are slow, and like to beat up tires, but works as I lack modeling skills. Too many mesh roads can murder the FPS. JRI has a good bridge, you can either change the look of the top on it with a road texture or go ahead and lay a thin (but not bent hard) mesh road over-top of the bridge surface for asphalt. I have this in my Roane County map too, it only has visible collision though. There at-least 2~3 different bridges in ECA if not four. Make use of these. Be aware that interacting with objects that don't have collision meshes slows down the physics processing especially on complex objects. There is also a 4096 object limit, per map. You'll want to script anything and everything into a forest brush BEFORE you get too far along. Everything you can. It means a lot especially on open-world-ish maps with lots of homes. Be aware if you stretch your terrain too far (like if you use square-size 2 or larger) invisible collision can happen with large slope/grade changes, be wary of that if such. Not so much an issue with size 1~1.5. If you use static objects, enable meshculling (meshculling = 1 in the main level json file) by default it's off. Don't copy my entire forest brush or index in my map or you'll have a long loading time, duplicate entries, and a few broken ones that can crash the game. Though I wouldn't mind if you copied a bunch, say, the ECA portions, etc, because there's lots in there, all the ones under buildings_all work. Also, DO check when backing up your map that the terrain reference in your main level JSON file is within the map's directory and not just in /levels/ where by default it saves it. Lose this file and you'll be in a hurt-locker. It's generally within the first two-hundred lines or so in your main level JSON (the terrain entry). If you do use my work all's that I ask is to preview it before you put it on beamng.drive so that I can tell you if any other author's / artist's work has been used, for proper credits, and who's is what, etc. Though, that being said, I've either created all my own road textures - or downloaded freebie textures and copy-pasta'ed my way (among much else) to having something better. My stuff is free for everyone to use. I don't mind. I also re-skinned a shed-load of grid-map pieces (cubes, sidewalks), to match my sidewalks in the map. They could come in handy but are really just plain boring blocks of tan concrete - useful ones at that. My road signs (diamond-shaped, stop, turn advisories, all with green posts) were done by REDROOSTERFARM and there's many homes under the /hice directory (yes, that's the name!) that are belonging to the Garfield Heights author Occam's Razer. Occam also made my 3d driveways, which I duped into 4 different classes with 3 types each. Please ask THEM if you want to use those items/objects. The business signs and traffic lights in my map, were originally sourced from material in B25Mitch's city map he made a while back. I only had two pages of signs + a directions sign to work with, though the only thing really the same is the traffic light and pole, and the actual size of the signs themselves, the graphics are all new and hand-done. Basically, if you're doing highways, know that anything more than a 7% grade is too much, in this game, I wouldn't go over 10%. You can look up the national highway standards on the internet, and I encourage you to do so. A base-model 4-cylinder car should be able to hold the speed limit going up all your hills, and drive all it's corners at the speed limit, too, without skidding much at all. Test with a laden commercial-truck (articulated lorry), too. Anything along the side of the highway (swails, embankments) with steeper than a 1:3 ratio grade should have guide-rails there in place as that's generally when they're placed, for down-hill drop-offs. As always, your map is your canvas, and I encourage you to have a blast. Just test the snot out of it before sending it out. The internet is super-handy for inspirational pictures, too, so don't neglect that. It's just one of many tools at your disposal. --Best of luck and keep plugging away at it (oh, and don't forget to back up diligently especially before messing with the forest brush entries!)...
Wow... thanks! I did do some research on the hill grades, and yes, I am working on straightening them all out. When I started the map, I really had no idea of my gameplan so now I kinda gotta go restart. I have some curbs I can use, I am just trying to figure out collision without using visible mesh. I know how to use collision mesh with sketchup, just sometimes it is a bit glitchy and doesn't work. I will keep working and I will let you know how it is going. Thanks for your time and lengthy response!
Let me know how you managed to do collision meshes (COLMESH, or COLMESH-1 I forget which, I think you add the '1' in Beamng for purposes to say pixel-size-on-display, meaning, when it is in view), in sketch-up. I couldn't figure out what to work in Sketchup to get them into Beamng (couldn't find the hierarchy list, like start01, blahblah COLMESH & Detail ## etc). If you could do that I could take this and run with it, and you'd have removed a major stumbling block of the Generic City remake I plan on doing (yes, I am going to do a city!). I wouldn't totally restart, I would just cut those hills down, and average them out, a bit. Take a look at some freeway grades in mountainous areas, and kind of 'average' out your hills where the road goes through. If you have lots of rolling hills gradually increasing in height (as often happens), up to a mountain etc, just make a smooth grade up. Lay the beginning and end of a mesh road and then add your points in the middle to adjust curves, taking care to add them evenly (split it in half when adding points, then in half again, if it kinks the points won't add in the right way and it'll look folded up like a pieces of ribbon or shoestring, if it does this check your points are evenly spaced and not KINKED). Then carve (raise or lower to mesh, F2 terrain editing) your terrain to the road (helps if thickness is like 1 and the width is about 50% wider than your entire road bed needs to be, shoulders included, so you can blend the side grades into the landscape without disturbing your roadbed), and smooth it out when done. Using a high (128~256) width division number especially when doing both sides of the highway at once will help you keep the corners banked correctly without so much ripple-effect when going in and out of corners, also, higher break-angle (lower = smoother, higher = jagged but less cpu hog when carving) will help keep corners even. Remember, spacing the nodes matters - decal or mesh roads when making corners! "Something about roads" thread has much more detail on this topic and I have contributed there also. Back up, back up, backup! Don't forget! Do atleast WEEKLY so you do not lose your map. If I hadn't done so I'd have lost over half my maps due to file errors and user errors (more likely!). --Cheers!
I did a test with my highway grades and I put a D15 on cruise at 65 mph and I was able to stay in a lane and not crash throughout the entire bit of highway I have done. I don't however have the second lane going in the opposite direction done. Regarding the Collision in sketchup, I created a tutorial page somewhere on this site, so I will find it and post the link in a different post. I also made a video to go along with it. It is also really easy. My only issue is that sometimes I will create something really complex and when you go into the Shape Editor to change all of the details to ColMesh's, you have hundreds of details. Usually, collision only works when you have one detail named ColMesh, not ColMesh-1 ColMesh-2 etc. When you look at the devs created static objects they have many different parts but only have that one detail. I have also not been able to find the hierarchy list in sketchup, I am sure you could probably find an answer on google? I will look and see, there has to be a way to merge all of the details into one big detail that is your collision mesh. When I create my roads I usually use the Improved Spline feature and that tends to take care of many odd shapes in the road. I also lay down a Mesh Road first and shape it the way I want it and then lay down my Decal road on top of that. Then you raise or lower the terrain to match the Mesh Road, and delete the mesh road. Sometimes however you can get some bumps and ridges on top of the road where the Mesh road changed grades, so you have to change the break angle to like 0.0000001 till it changes to like 9.542e0192 or some crap like that. So far I am trying to go section by section of the map. Regarding your road textures, I love them so much, they are such a lifesaver because I have such a terrible time trying to create my own textures from scratch. The only question I have is that some of the old rural roads that are a bit lighter seem to not be seamless, is this intentional or should I avoid using these ones? I suppose I could always change them up a little to look a bit more seamless. I will brainstorm some ideas. Thank you again for your time, I am honestly surprised by your interest level in my map so far. It isn't anything to spectacular, but I hope that with the help of others it will be just like the great maps out there like your huge maps. -Cheers!
Many of my textures weren't originally seamless, I had to make them appear so. Take a drive through my map and see if they still appear seamless or not, and take a picture and let me know if they aren't appearing as such. Maybe there's something I missed here. Some are intended as PATCH textures to be used for lots, expanded as need be, or as intersection pieces, etc, and are not intended to be used the length of the road. There are matching textures for all of them. There's also several different 'styles' of road textures, as not every road was paved at the same time, with the same source of materials (some may be sandstone/shells mix which weathers to the color of sand itself - very light, some may be typical grey/black asphalt, eventually going to get some of that dark purple type pavement in too though it's more common in the northeast than here in TN - in addition, some are more recent pave-jobs such as the black new dark asphalt, some are much older and sun-bleached out, hence lighter). I take interest in maps that have a highway system in them, highways are fun because going fast and not crashing is FUN. The width-divisions feature of mesh-roads set to 128~256 + break angle of 0.02 will generally iron out 95% of the crinkles in your road bed. What others are left can be fixed with a smoother before you do the banks on the side of the road.
OK, I also have the 1st release of your map, so I will download the newest addition, maybe t newer textures will be in there. I also do find open space maps like highways to be fun, just cause you know, FAST.
They're coming. This is proving harder than it looks, and I am still running into many issues. I will post pictures soon, I PROMISE!!
