I also found this tutorial but from what I understand this is just to use items lined up with their own separate spline just to make placing them easier. It doesn’t look like it will conform with the shape of the landscape.
Populating Meshes Along a Spline | Tips & Tricks | Unreal Engine
Usually guardrails do not exactly conform to the terrain.
Can you imagine the people installing them having to bend them up to conform?
Solutions that conform are possible. But expensive to render. Or you have to actor merge later on.
The idea of creating a mesh with the rails is probably the best - but the rails will deform.
Making the rails mesh have the same pivot point as the road mesh goes a long way towards setting things up.
The alternative here is to use the spline as a guiding path to place instanced meshes (which will also cost a lot less).
To do it, you would just create a bluetility script that moves instances around to distribute them along the spline.
It’s not super easy, but it’s not really complex either.
This won’t allow “bends”, so it may not be ideal for all pieces of the road.
However it can work with a “mixed” workflow if you set it up for it in the road spline code…
Anyway,
Let’s remind everyone that all a spline is, is a list of data points represented visually.
Accessing those point values you can do a lot. Including creating procedural meshes …
@xeoncat I didn’t even consider that! That makes sense
@MostHost_LA That’s true. Now that I think of it I think I’d only need to add rails around sharp turns and roads surrounded by steep drops. I need to pay more attention next time I’m driving in the mountains.
Add 2 control points for every section where you think the model will be different (for example you want a road termination or a no rail section), in this specific section you can add a different mesh or use the same mesh but override the material
