Ok i have to say… this the most annoying thing i’ve ever seen… making roads in unreal.
It will take you HOURS to make something… and after saving things get worse… the whole setup is messed up… when you move a part of the spline up or down… the texture will be removed.
I had some sculpting around the road… saved… opened the map again… gone!.. none of my sculpting around the splines was saved… every other sculpt i made were there.
I already made a feature request… but please guys at epic… this is ridiculous… such a great and awesome engine… and roads is just a huge problem… these things should be fast and easy instead of an annoyance and 3rd party tools.
I stopped making roads… because a dirt path on a tile is just a sad sight.
Fix it…
The question that follows is…
How can i DRAW a dirt road… like… take a nice texture… a brush… and just draw the whole thing out?
This is not on Epic’s list of things to do considering they have their own way to create roads (meshes on flat terrain). Note that “Infrastructure” isn’t in any Epic games. Try to find a UDK/UE4 title that has actual infrastructure (I say actual, because not all Cities are flat). Hence why you don’t see a good Road Tool: they have no use for it. Remember this is Epic’s engine that they share. The engine is still made for the games Epic wants to make. This is not a one stop Engine, unfortunately. You will need to make tools that pertain to your project, just like Epic makes tools that pertain to their own games. This is also why Epic allows PlugIns to be sold. They can’t tend to all game genres at once, so they allow the community to help each other by sharing/selling the tools they make for their own projects. And from Epic’s standpoint, who wouldn’t do the same? Decided to share or not, this is still their own engine to do with whatever they want. And as they should, they worked dang hard to get UE4 this far!
As for ‘DRAW’. Try adding in road textures to your landscape material, and don’t hold me to this but if you can get vertex paint in the landscape material, use that for painting tire tracks and road lines. Not sure what the performance on that would be though, Vertex paint ‘can’ get pretty expensive.
I am hoping someone will correct me though and come up with something better, but I have searched and scoured the internet for a performance friendly solution to roads and the Road Editor by Talos is the only thing available (as of about a year ago, not sure what exists now).
You could always set your materials up as functions and place one material function specificlly for a road texture. This video series here gives a good example for making the functions and getting them working in your landscape. Disregard the world machine portion if you don’t have that, but this could help with “painting” your dirt road onto the landscape until you either find a better way or find one using another option.
