Any up to date mapmaking tutorials ?

That is the way it is supposed to look as it is a macro texture. It is the color base for all of your future
terrain materials, the underlying foundation. You will use the macro in the diffuse slot for your
terrain materials.

Open up the editor and go to rockydirt. Replace the diffuse with the macro and set it's size to 2048.
Do the autopaint routine and see what happens. Do this with the rock material and grass as well.
The selection of what terrain material goes where is all dependent on what your macro looks like.

Test: paint a grass material from 0-8 degrees, a rockydirt from 8-30 degrees and rock from 30-90
degrees. Adjust detail sizes on all these to roughly 8-11 and levels to around 0.5.

The rock texture macro and detail settings can be reversed for a much nicer looking rock.

 

Wow, just, wow (I redid the macro with a gradient instead of several textures )

What do you mean by "reversed" ? I'm not sure I understand what you mean

 

In the T3D terrain material editor the diffuse texture will have larger/higher values than the detail texture. If you switch these
values (macro smaller/lower, detail larger/higher), the effect is a very pronounced and detailed look from all over the map. Diffuse
textures are inherently lower detail than detail textures so what you are actually doing is making a better and more detailed texture
the one that gets seen the most. I first noticed this in one of Ouerbackers maps and the effect is mind blowing.

Switch these two values with only the rock texture as any others simply do not see the benefit.

 

This indeed looks much nicer, that's a really nice effect
The "Grass" texture however is still creating grass particles, and green patricles coming out of a yellow/orange ground is strange. I don't know if you explained that to me already, in which case I didn't understand , but how do you change that ?

 

That's where deeper map planning comes into play, as in what the macro is supposed to be representing terrain texture wise.
For now you can simply remove the macro from the grass diffuse and replace it with the stock diffuse. A bit of additional info:

If you want to change your macro coloring without killing your whole map and pretty much see real time changes try this:

Make your changes as usual in World Machine. Save a copy of your existing macro to your desktop. Overwrite the old
macro with the new macro and then copy/paste over the old macro in your terrain folder. Open up BeamNG and your level,
your macro should now be the new one. Keeping World Machine open in one window and map folders in another makes short work
of changes like this. If you mess up or become confused simply add your old macro back in from the desktop and make a drink.

 

Welp, now every material makes smoke and have tire skidmarks.
So now there's no more green particles but I can leave skidmarks on sand ...
EDIT : nevermind, I redid the whole material thing properly and now it works

So now, should I add meshroads like this : http://www.beamng.com/threads/tutorial-adding-heightmap-roads-using-blender.16356/
Or is that a bit too hard for my skill level ? (I'm a perfect noob in Blender by the way)

 

Welp....I'm still in the dark ages regarding Blender as well so I'll have to hand the baton off on that
one. I know World Machine road building fairly well and that's it. The big thing these days is camber
so if you're intending on having state of the art roads then Hutch's tutorial you linked is the way to
go. He's been very gracious in offering anyone help with it and I intend on attempting it soon.

If you decide to go the Blender avenue with anything I suggest viewing and ABSORBING
( my current problem ), some of the millions of Blender videos out there to get a basic
understanding of it. After that go for Sam's tutorial! We all gotta' do the hard stuff eventually.

 

Yep, I'll definitely have to watch and learn too, so no Blender roads for now
Actually, I didn't know making roads in WM was possible, did you do yours with it ? If so I'm gonna do that instead, for now anyway
Is Sam LJFHutch or another person though

 

Sam is LJFHutch, yes.

The road in Baja Hills is World Machine. I merely suggest it since you already are getting familiar
with it. There are other ways to do roads and all of them involve outside programs. I am happy with
WM roads and am comfortable with the process so far, I plan to continue with it for the time being.
There is talk of WM implementing camber ability and I hope it happens!

Anyway, I would be happy to show you how I do the road scheme in WM. Someone did that for me
*cough* Doullpepper*cough* and now I can show you.

 

Oh, Doullpepper
I know that guy, he's very kind and since he speaks french, he told me where he found his textures and models, and then we chatted for a bit
You can show me how to do that ? Awesome !

 

Doullpepper is very kind and good time as any to say that!! He likes heavy metal too ha!

As usual I need to head out for work. In the meantime the road generation in WM will center
on the layout generator. I do not have a lot of experience with multiple layout generators and
usually work with only one. If you have one already make sure it is selected in the device view
and have your overlay device locked on preview. Select the layout view in the top toolbar, select
overview, zoom to extents and then back to the layout view.

Start by making a line anywhere and right click anywhere when done. Once the line sets itself
right click on it and select edit shape properties. Select 'drop shape to selected device'. The line
should now roughly be set into/on the terrain. Right click your line again, select edit shape properties.
The height at 2600m doesn't much matter at this point*. Put your fall off at 100m, put the fall off slope
to the straight 45 degree angle. In the fall off edit, drag the right side node to the left 5 grids, making sure
that node never deviates from the top, click accept.

Set your build resolution to 1024. The layout generator auto builds itself. Zoom in on the layout view
to see what the results are. Your road should be flat and roughly following terrain features as well as
a nice angled fall off.

I'll leave it at that for now. Mess around with it and I'll check in in a bit. Hopefully you understand all
this!

 

Yup, I understood everything and this works perfectly ! Thanks
One thing though : If I translate/scale the shape, it doesn't match up with the ground at all ! Even after selecting "drop shape on selected device", there would still be a part not matching at all
Latest progress :

 

Okay, you are rapidly approaching or have my surpassed my current abilities in this program..lol. What are you trying
to accomplish with translate/scale?

 

I wanted to make my road go more towards the edge of the map, but when I saw the mess that it was, I redid the road and it worked fine. That's what I get for being lazy
I suppose I'm gonna have a bad time making the decalroads match up with this. Oh well, I'll see how it goes after importing this new heightmap
That's what I need to do, right ?

 

I only asked about the scale/translate because I've never needed it nor taken the time to investigate it.
There is a scheme where you can get your road a separate color and therefore make a sort of
'outline' you can use to apply decal roads. Once you do that putting down the roads is quite easy.
No matter what you use decal roads require all sorts of fine tweaking.

The road color involves another set of devices and isn't too complicated. You'll want the color to be
as close to asphalt as possible to utilize the macro effect for a road bed gravel texture.

As for moving your road around or up and down, there are other ways no doubt but I just use the
spline vertex points to move/adjust/drop/raise the road and do quick builds at 1024 to see the
changes. I also disable any device not needed at the moment. It is fairly time consuming but
I became really in tune with what was going on and it became much quicker.

Right click on your road and click edit shape properties. Pick any vertex 'X' and right click on it.
Select 'enter precise value'. With that you can set a very precise elevation for that individual
vertex. Changes to it will effect points on either side of it but WM is really smart at keeping
that math realistic. Doing lots of these is where the 'intuition' starts to build and progress.

The lofting curve is a pain especially when you have lots of vertexes involved. You can give it
a shot but personally I find it way to convoluted and imprecise to be any good. I suspect you also
figured out the curve smoothing, looks like it.

I will post a screen showing the road coloring network as trying to explain that is not appealing right now.
--- Post updated ---
Okay looks like I'm going to explain it, not interested in figuring out why my screenshots won't show up in
their assigned place.

Add three devices: A chooser, a color generator and a clamp.

Wire the mask output from the layout (road) generator to the clamp input.
Wire the clamp output to the chooser input slot #3.
Wire color generator output to chooser slot#2
Wire main macro output to chooser slot#1

When doing this the macro output will cease to feed your bitmap output and overlay view devices.
Simply feed the chooser output into those. You shouldn't need to do anything to the chooser. Your
grey road should now be defined in your overlay view and the 3D view.

The hard part here and difficult to explain is adjusting the clamp to get a nice sharp edge for the
road color. You'll just have to mess around with the sliders until you get it. A 1024 build on this is
critical and again, intuition plays a role.

Once you get this to your liking do a 2048 build and check it all out. All this work is why I want to
invest in one of the upcoming 10 core Broadwell-E's.

 

Like this ? I hope I followed your steps correctly

 

That looks about right....and nice. Torque likes to wash out these colors so more than likely they will
be a bit brighter when applied.
I can't remember the exact process for getting the clamp exactly to the road dimensions but it looks
like you've got it close and there always will be a bit of bleed over regardless.

I just have build at 1024, camera panned in close in the 3D view with the clamp device open on
top of that.

Looking good man!

 

Okay, cool, thanks
So now that I have my road, do I need to import back my heightfield and my macro, or is there another way to do it ?
I noticed separate images for the roads/runways on Grooved Range so I'm not sure anymore

 

You won't need to re-import the heightmap if you haven't changed anything except the macro coloring.
Now is the time to make a new material for your macro in the terrain materials editor if you haven't
already. Name it 'yourleveldiffuse' and put the macro in the diffuse slot. None of the other slots will
be needed right now. Save that and make sure it's written/copied back to your main map terrain materials
folder. I work from the main contents folder and not in the documents folder so our map locations and
processes could diverge eventually.

Build your macro with the new road coloring and export as usual, overwrite the old one if you wish.
The point here is to have any changes done to the macro take effect automatically in the map merely
by overwriting it with successive changed macros. Hope that makes sense.