Author | Aaron |
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Last modified | 11th of October 2009 |
This tutorial will walk you through the complete process for making a road on your terrain using L3DT.
To follow this tutorial, you will need L3DT Professional release 2.5d build 0 or later, as released on the 28th of May 2008. This is because the tutorial will make use of the attributes map brush tool, which was updated in that release. To check that you have the correct version, select the 'Help→About' menu item. This will show the about box, which includes the version number.
If you are using L3DT Standard (free), you will probably be able to follow most of the tutorial, but the results won't be quite as pretty, since you won't be able to generate the high-resolution attributes/light/texture maps at the end.
Without further ado, the results in 3D:
Were I to write this tutorial again (and I probably will, someday), I would like to replace the green grassy edges of the roads with pebbles or concrete. A better asphalt texure might help too. Stay tuned for tutorial v2.0!
You could write a plugin to do it, but…
The texture level of detail required to sharply render lines on a unique precalculated terrain texture is beyond that which can be supported in most 3D renderers for all but the tiniest terrain sizes. Instead, it is recommended that the lines be applied in your rendering system (e.g. game engine, ray-tracer, etc), using a texture decal or splatting system. This is something you have to implement; L3DT can't do it for you.