Spline Decals?

[lunyBunny]

we do not want to flatten the terrain where the spline passes, we want the road to adapt to the terrain.
adapting the terrain to the road and/or using meshes on top will still not achieve proper blending, respect tessellation+displacement, or have proper behavior with the Landscape LOD.
we all know that there are workarounds out there. we also know none of them are satisfactory in terms of visuals and workflow, which is the actual reason that this thread exists

Is very unusual for me to think in build a pavement road without first flattening the selected ground under the road.
If you want a perfectly plain road in an uneven surface, no matter tessellation, POM, height-field deformation, bump noises, foliage, LOD system, first of all is necessary thinking a way to cleaning and flattening the terrain.

I think applying decal and normal map 'only' in one terrain totally cracked, full of irregularities, can shows an unsatisfactory result also. Especially when you want a perfect concrete road. It can work well only when you need a mud road, with tire trails using normal map or parallax occlusion, But even so there will be situations where is necessary to flattening the ground and removing automatically foliage (rocks and grass) along the 'decal' spline.


The bigger question here is spline decals exists a long time in CryEngine, but so far, exists only in the field of fiction in the Unreal Engine.

I have provided some solutions only.

[Chosker]

Perhaps as part of a solution for this already exists:
Https://i.imgur.com/ZbRHmA9.jpg

One approach in river tool inside the kit demo can be used.
To avoid issues like showed in image above, there is a Blutility mode onto the river tool details panel used for flattening the terrain where the spline passes.

Only remains to figured out one way to solve how to projecting images, or decals, over terrain layers.

we do not want to flatten the terrain where the spline passes, we want the road to adapt to the terrain.
adapting the terrain to the road and/or using meshes on top will still not achieve proper blending, respect tessellation+displacement, or have proper behavior with the Landscape LOD.
we all know that there are workarounds out there. we also know none of them are satisfactory in terms of visuals and workflow, which is the actual reason that this thread exists

[lunyBunny]

Perhaps as part of a solution for this already exists:
Https://i.imgur.com/ZbRHmA9.jpg

One approach in river tool inside the kit demo can be used.
To avoid issues like showed in image above, there is a Blutility mode onto the river tool details panel used for flattening the terrain where the spline passes.

Only remains to figured out one way to solve how to projecting images, or decals, over terrain layers.

[Maximum-Dev]

Nice! I'm really excited to see how much the community got on board with that. I'm passing all of what is happening along in my reports and getting this in front of the eyes of people who work on these systems.

There are some good votes accumulated on this by now.
Did those people see it?
Did they say anything about it?

[lunyBunny]

We have Simple Road Too by [MENTION=15788]siebencorgie[/MENTION]:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/show...mple-Road-Tool
It is not decal, but it seems to be a good temporary solution. Have you tried River tool released together Kit Demo, modifying it to roads and paths.

[Maximum-Dev]

Yeah regarding time saving, when a team is doing their best to achieve realism and they do achieve their goal, roads are still one major issue breaking all the realism either by clipping with landscape, bad blending to landscape etc. as shown in the first page. That makes manual touch ups necessary all along the splines to fix the clipping/floating issues and if any paid level designer is doing that that's basically burning cash in an unproductive way. And still unlike decals, the hard blending makes the overall look really weird i.e imagine if you put a brown dirt path on a green grass layer.

[lunyBunny]

I'm not quite sure what you mean but in case you mean painting the road with landscape layer, well the road textures usually have directional features that need to bend as the road bends but with painting on the ground the texture X,Y is always facing one direction only.





Oh and btw, Spline Displacement should support collision otherwise we'd go through the raised/lowered areas.

This is my Idea only, Not the final solution for the problem!
I'm not a programmer, but I had one idea, I do not know, others guys may have thought about another better solution. But:

I think, a road decal spline could have one invisible object working like one helper (with a configurable radius), like one cylinder for example. One invisible pipe, working like a projector, projecting decals, or any material, in one mesh objects or landscape objects when intersecting inside it.


For me virtual pipes could working like guides projecting decals or materials, erasing foliage and deforming terrain, unifying features such landscape displacement, collision detection, foliage eraser, decal projection (or any material) and surface snapping guides for rivers and roads.

[ZenDavis]

For those of you who don't know, if you're paying level designers to place roads in your game, this will save you a significant amount of money as your level designers won't have to do constant touchups for the length of the road. I'm sure one of the more experienced level designers here could breakdown how much you would save in costs.

[Maximum-Dev]

Hey Guys and [MENTION=13257]Maximum-Dev[/MENTION]


The road decal is nothing more than a simple, unique decal, (same decal used in other ways). But this time the decal is using one spline to handling and spawning (replicating the decal) in the 3-D surface.

But for soft blending between materials, and interaction with terrain and foliage,
roads (or other similar things) can be created using the "old friend" feature within the Landscape Editor (Paint tool) using one road material defined in "Target layer". It could be the same spline used in the Landscape Editor but this time helping us as one guide (Paint tool) to painting one road as one material layer in the terrain, and at the same time erasing foliage and sculpting, flattening the terrain along it. A "Spline for sculpting and painting road, rivers, tracks, etc...".

I'm not quite sure what you mean but in case you mean painting the road with landscape layer, well the road textures usually have directional features that need to bend as the road bends but with painting on the ground the texture X,Y is always facing one direction only.





Oh and btw, Spline Displacement should support collision otherwise we'd go through the raised/lowered areas.

[lunyBunny]

Hey Guys and [MENTION=13257]Maximum-Dev[/MENTION]


The road decal is nothing more than a simple, unique decal, (same decal used in other ways). But this time the decal is using one spline to handling and spawning (replicating the decal) in the 3-D surface.

But for soft blending between materials, and interaction with terrain and foliage,
roads (or other similar things) can be created using the "old friend" feature within the Landscape Editor (Paint tool) using one road material defined in "Target layer". It could be the same spline used in the Landscape Editor but this time helping us as one guide (Paint tool) to painting one road as one material layer in the terrain, and at the same time erasing foliage and sculpting, flattening the terrain along it. A "Spline for sculpting and painting road, rivers, tracks, etc...".

[Maximum-Dev]

This would be incredible.

Yeah it's extensively used in some of the recent AAA titles and does wonders!

[Wilkes]

3. Displacement. With spline decals supporting displacement mapping (overriding landscape's displacement map) we can make non-destructive changes to landscape if/when landscape uses tessellation and displacement mapping. If displacement mapping on spline decals come true, it opens the doors for many more uses on landscape besides projecting a material on a surface. (This is more important than the other 2).

This would be incredible.

[Maximum-Dev]

[MENTION=13147]JamesEmory[/MENTION], That's great!
[MENTION=8]Alexander Paschall[/MENTION], Updated the OP.


"Hello,

I'm rewrote the OP to reflect what this thread has been through. 5.9.2017

How many people need Spline Decals?
Almost everyone. It's the most wanted feature by the UE4 community. Check out the link below!
https://issues.unrealengine.com/issu...nt=&sort=votes

Why people need spline decals:
It saves everyone tremendous amount of manual work and tweaking, it can also be used for many different purposes. We've also done a comparison between Spline Decals and the current Landscape Spline Tool.
https://forums.unrealengine.com/show...l=1#post701303

Example of Spline Decal in Cryengine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb60V05bg1U And documentation http://docs.cryengine.com/display/SDKDOC2/The+Road+Tool

What features would it benefit from:
1. Blocking Grass Tool from distributing meshes within the spline width.
2. Remove painted foliage that are within the spline width.
3. Displacement. With spline decals supporting displacement mapping (overriding landscape's displacement map) we can make non-destructive changes to landscape if/when landscape uses tessellation and displacement mapping. If displacement mapping on spline decals come true, it opens the doors for many more uses on landscape besides projecting a material on a surface. (This is more important than the other 2).

Thanks! "

[JamesEmory]

It's become the second most wanted feature.
https://issues.unrealengine.com/issu...nt=&sort=votes

I was the 79th vote...and now it's number 1.

[Alexander Paschall]

Nice! I'm really excited to see how much the community got on board with that. I'm passing all of what is happening along in my reports and getting this in front of the eyes of people who work on these systems.