Experimental Salama Cascade (4k) v0.2.0

I wanted to figure out how to make a Beamng map procedurally. Well, this is about 80% procedural, so that's close enough. Laying out roads is not procedural, but that's ok cause it's the fun part.

Forum thread: https://www.beamng.com/threads/salama-cascade.97788/



My goal was to come up with a way to make awesome roads on top of Gaea terrains, and I think it works pretty well!



The technique goes like this:

- create terrain heightmap and PBR textures with Gaea
- import terrain into Blender, and add roads using this technique by BeamNG dev LJFHutch: https://www.beamng.com/threads/making-road-in-blender-2-9x.77566/#post-1291294 updated to Blender 3.6. Basically, you make a road mesh follow a bezier curve, and position the curve over the terrain.
- bake roads onto the heightmap and render road masks
- back in Gaea, texture roads using new heightmap and masks
- back in Blender, use Geoscatter to add forests, export and convert to forest.json
- import into game using terrain importer
- pull in textures, materials, daes from any zipped level using python tool
- vroom vroom

The forest tool, terrain sculpting, terrain painting, or any manual work in the world editor were not used. The terrain spans 400m of elevation, which is controlled during the process.

Trees are spaced just far enough apart that you can drive between them, so every practically every square meter of the map is drivable.

You could make a completely new variant of this map in just couple hours. Just randomize the seeds in Gaea, place new roads, and import to the game.

Roads:
- 15-minute paved perimiter loop
- various unpaved roads that are meant to be evocative of mountain bike trails
- most groundmodels typically found on driving surfaces are used: gravel, dirt, asphalt, asphalt_old, dirt_dusty, dirt_dust_loose, sand
- some nice realistic flat-out rally-finland style jumps

Feel free to use the map for content creation, with a link to this page.