I'm interested to know more about the methods people use for making pavements/sidewalks. It is the main area I really struggle with, and it holds me back from creating urban maps. I have tried uploading the heightmap into blender, but this is always slightly off from the real thing, and also I tend to use large files for this, and it crashes blender. I've tried uploading smaller heightmaps, but I can't get them to match up when I import back into BeamNG. Any thoughts/tutorials/etc. would be greatly appreciated. I'm pretty mediocre in Blender, so go easy...
I'm sure that a premade blender object is the right way to do it, but I don't want to bother with all that so I use mesh roads and they've turned out like this.
I wanted to make a uk residential map at the normal 2x2km. Someone figured out how make it happen and I'm not good enough with blender to make it for a long time. Still a massive blender noob. Those horrible mesh roads that you don't want to use, use them as a template, export it to .dae, import that to blender and go from there. Set it up so the mesh road is already at the correct height as you place it, done in preferences I think. This street was 2 mesh road pavement templates and another at the back. These walls, pavements and roundabouts were mesh roads too, go-kart track made from random squiggle in blender. Set the object origin point (or whatever it's called, its been ages, I'm a noob still) to a corner of the object to line it up easier in beam, then delete mesh road template after aligning the .dae. Export selected as collada, under file tab. Thanks to (I forgot their username) for this in another forum post I saw a while ago.
Personally, heightmaps have always been the bane of my existence. I'll use them where necessary (such as with World Machine exports), but one of my all-time favorite tools that BeamNG has ever introduced to the editor is the raise/lower to mesh tool. This allows me to quickly map out terrain in Blender and export to BeamNG, in a way that is more versatile and flexible than any heightmap-based approach. In my opinion, curbs are best created as huge, singular static meshes. This means they have nearly the maximum performance cost they could (which is not all that much), but are extremely flexible. Working in Blender, I'll use bezier curves to map out where the curbs will go horizontally, then use the array and curve deform modifiers to repeat the curb mesh along the curve. Then, I project the curb mesh down to my landscape template using the shrinkwrap modifier. This results in the mesh being squashed down flat against the landscape template, so I finally use a displace modifier, acting only on the top of the curb mesh, to 'reinflate' the curb. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Blender, so that might have all been a word salad to you. But, that's my workflow.
Really interesting responses here. Thanks all. I'd got as far as array, curve deform and shinkwrap, but hadn't considered displace to reinflate it. Nice idea.
That’s what I thought. My first tries look awkward though. I have made some pavement building blocks in blender and played with the spline feature in world editor. For more or less straight roads it works quite well and for crossings I have special blocks. But still not happy. I need a one year blender class The spline feature is perfect for placing reflector poles. By the way. I will develop a feature in my mapping tool which converts a folder from the object tree with tstatics to forest items if scaling is is the same on all axis.
I have just finished the asset to forest item conversion tool: https://www.beamng.com/threads/beamng-tool-for-map-creators-updated-2023-10-07.89058/
