tarmac/bitumen material

[tricky]

Which is your preference for a high quality tarmac-type material? Procedral or Bitmap-based? I need it to be as photorealistic as possible and my efforts so far have been pretty naff. Bitmaps are never big enough and I just can't get proc-maps looking right. I need the material to cover a large area of car-park, so it needs to be seemless.

Any tips?

[tammo]

use two different tileable bitmaps mixed by a large noise procudural.

[tricky]

goog idea - I'll give it a go.

[DaForce]

If you cant find a decent sized texture, just go out and take your own, its mega easy to make a something like that seamless.

[paulison]

one thing Im wondering is how do people get the tiremark/grease lines along the middle of roads?

Currently I think people make one bit texture in this case in photoshop which is built from various sections of tiled maps. Am I wrong?

If i have roads that arnt straight, and they were modelling in other software, is it an option to have a texture for these lines using uvmapping which follow a curve? Its all a bit of a mystery to me!

[elektrosport]

If i have roads that arnt straight, and they were modelling in other software, is it an option to have a texture for these lines using uvmapping which follow a curve? Its all a bit of a mystery to me

you can do this by lofting your road along a path, using the lenght/width mapping option to control your tiling.

-or-

you can use your unwrap UVW modifier and do it by hand.

-or-

build your road as similar sized segments/rectangular polys and apply UVW coordinates/face mapping..

cheers,
K.

[Clifton Santiago]

What I will often do for this type of material is try to make it look as good as possible procedurally, and then do a high-res rendering of it in plan. I then paint into the map in photoshop and then re-apply it in Max. And even then I may mix it with an asphalt-like bitmap as tammo mentioned. Also, for greater realism, I recommend a bit of glossy reflection, as I learned from cpnichols in his gnomon video.

[geoff]

Here's a tutorial on roads from Ted Boardman over at CGarchitect

http://www.cgarchitect.com/upclose/article25_TB.asp

Pretty much as electrosport described though

Geoff

[tigerX]

Sorry to hijack your thread tricky, this is sort of relevant. How can i overcome the 'fades in the distance' effect of this road, ive created a hi rez image for material?

scanline render, target camera (though same effect when rendered in vray)

[tigerX]

any one else find that they discover the solution to their question about 2 minutes after posting a question? - it's the blur setting on the map innit!

[DaForce]

it suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure is

[Infrared digital]

I would recommend the roads generator by Ambient light - works very well for me

http://ambientlight.co.uk/component/...,21/Itemid,58/

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