I would like to request some improvements for making roads within UE4.
After doing some digging around, I am assuming that making decent roads with splines is impossible as of now. Reasons, I say “decent” are:
currently you can only use Masked and maybe Surface Translucent materials for spline meshes, which means edges will always intersect with terrain (think dirt road, curving and going up or down). Terrain resolution will never be enough to conform perfectly (see Landscape mountains demo). With Translucent material, it’s probably possible to use DepthFade to soften intersecting edges, but performance hit will be noticeable, plus translucent materials don’t exactly work well in shadows.
Vertex mesh painting with SplineMesh components is not possible, thus making these for roads pretty useless (cannot paint puddles/damage through material)
Now, first issue could be solved if we could use decal like material, which projects down on terrain. But I’m guessing we won’t see that any time soon, as we’ve been begging for geometry decals since 4.0, and that’s basically the same idea. Second issue may not be fixable at all, due to the way spline mesh components work, so the only workaround I can think of is: export to max, detach road, import back as geometry. But if you do any modification, you basically repeat the process, which is a pipeline hell.
Am missing something here? Perhaps any of Epic guys can suggest some ways on how to deal with these problems. I’m sure many people who have to create realistic roads are looking for the same answers. Thanks in advance!
To elaborate a bit more. This would be a dream come true if Unreal had a road tool like THIS.
The important bit is Material setup. Since they use “Decal” shader, they allow user to pile up more decals with different sort priorities on top, in order to create variation. Also, Decal shader doesn’t cast shadows, affects AO or ZFights with anything, thus making it perfect for roads. Use of Masked material in Unreal looks very unnatural, in my opinion, and Transclucent one does not accept decals.
[=BrickTop;462104]
To elaborate a bit more. This would be a dream come true if Unreal had a road tool like THIS.
The important bit is Material setup. Since they use “Decal” shader, they allow user to pile up more decals with different sort priorities on top, in order to create variation. Also, Decal shader doesn’t cast shadows, affects AO or ZFights with anything, thus making it perfect for roads. Use of Masked material in Unreal looks very unnatural, in my opinion, and Transclucent one does not accept decals.
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Hi BrickTop,
That is something that has already been implemented in the editor with our Landscape Spline Tool:
Additionally, we have blueprint splines to allow the creation of pathways and roads, check out the Blueprint Spline Track example in the Learn tab of the launcher for additional information. We have a tutorial stream vod going through the setup of the blueprint spline track here:
Thanks for your reply. I am well aware of those tools, but that’s not what I am talking about. I am referring to the way those roads blend in with the landscape. Of course, if one is making a cartoony level or pure race track game the current method will work, but for something more natural looking present approach is not very usable, unfortunately.
The road toal is not an issue in itself. We can add roads to landscape splines no problem. the issue is intersections, extended pathways, and the fact that you can’t import splines from say 3ds max into UE4.
Also, the blueprint splines track has stretching UVs.