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Part 3: Adding the road to the heightmap

Part 3: Adding the road to the heightmap

Road tutorial home

Now for the fun part - making the road using the bulldozer brush in Sapphire.

Opening Sapphire

If the 3D viewer is not already open (as it should be if you followed the last section), you can open the Sapphire 3D viewer using the '3D' button on the L3DT toolbar, or else by selecting the 'Extensions→Sapphire→Open 3D renderer' menu option. If you've applied the template image from the last section, the results should look like the image below left, and if not, it should look like the image below right.

Sapphire, with a template image.	Sapphire, without a template image.

Sapphire controls

If you're not familiar with Sapphire, the controls are:

Key / control	What it does
W	move forwards
A	move left
S	move backwards
D	move right
E	move up
R	move down
Left click & drag	Apply the selected tool*
Right click & drag	Pan the camera
* If no tool is selected, this will pan the camera instead.

Please note that this is a short list of the controls. The full list is provided in Sapphire's user guide.

If you are using a non-QWERTY keyboard, you can re-map these keys to more convenient ones. Please see Sapphire's user guide for instructions.

Selecting the heightmap brush tools

To open the heightfield editing tools in Sapphire, select the 'Edit→Heightfield tools' menu item, shown below:

This will open the 'heightfield tools' dialog box, shown below. This dialog box lists all of the brush tools that are available to you for editing the heightmap in the 3D editor. The main one we're going to use for roads is the 'bulldozer' brush.

After enabling the heightfield tools, Sapphire will automatically cancel the overlay of the template image. There is a reason for this behaviour, but it's not particularly valid in this case, so please go ahead and select the 'Options→Select texture' menu option to re-enable the template image overlay.

Storing a backup

If you're human like me, you're probably going to make mistakes. L3DT does not yet have a full 'undo' system, but it has the next best thing: backup and restore. To store a backup copy of your heightfield before you do any editing, select the 'Edit→Backup' menu option (as shown below).

If, after some messing about with the heightfield brushes, you realise that you have indeed made a mistake, you can undo your changes using the 'Edit→Restore' menu option. This will restore the heightfield to how it was when you last pressed 'backup'.

You can press 'backup' as often as you like (e.g. after 'good' changes), and 'restore' will always revert to the last backup point you've made.

I strongly suggest you make a backup before you proceed with using the heightmap brush tools.

Using the bulldozer

The bulldozer is Sapphire's tool for making a uniformly-sloped point-to-point road, along with any embankments or cuttings required to make it fit with the surrounding terrain (e.g., see below).

Before bulldozer	After bulldozer

[ Images swiped from Sapphire user-guide. ]

To enable the bulldozer, select the 'bulldozer' option in the 'heightfield tools' dialog box. This will open the 'bulldozer settings' dialog box, shown below:

You probably won't need to change these settings from the defaults, but for completeness, I'll explain what they mean below. To edit any of these settings, double-click on them in the dialog box.

Setting	What the…?
Edge slope	If the bulldozer has to build up an embankment or cut one into the terrain to allow your road to go through, the Edge slope setting is the angle, in degrees, of the embankments. The minimum angle is 0 (flat) and the maximum is 90 (vertical), with 45 generally being the best option (see image below).
Edge width	This is the maximum width of the embankments, as measured from the edge of the road, in pixels. If you're making a deep cutting through a hill or a very high causeway over a valley, you may need to increase this, but generally a value of 100 pixels should be sufficient.
Vertical offset	This is the vertical offset above/below the terrain, in metres, of the start and end points of the bulldozer path. If this is negative, the bulldozer will start and end below the terrain (useful for digging trenches). If positive, it will start and end above the terrain (useful for building walls). Zero is the default value, and should be used when making roads.

The image below, nabbed from the internetwebs, shows a real-world example of an embankment created by blasting/bulldozing a road through an Appalachian hillside. The slope looks a bit steeper than 45 degrees; maybe around 60 degrees.

:tutorials:l3dt:roads:cuttingexample.jpg

A real-world road cutting, showing an embankment angle of ~60 degrees.
[ Image courtesy Geology @ NAU ]

To apply the bulldozer, simply left-click-and-hold the mouse on the start point, drag to the end point, and release the mouse button. As you're dragging the bulldozer tool, spheres will be shown at the start and end points, with a red connecting line.

To change the width of the bulldozer brush, use the mouse scroll wheel. The width of the bulldozer path is shown by the diameter of the bulldozer tool sphere.

Remember, if you make a mistake, you can undo it using the 'Edit→Restore' menu option in Sapphire.

By making several bulldozer brush-strokes along the road path in the template, I came up with this:

Using other heightfield tools

The bulldozer brush often makes sharp, unsightly edges. After bulldozing the road path, you can clean-up these edges using the other heightfield tools, such as 'Smooth' (shown below) and 'Avalanche'.

Once you're happy with the heightfield geometry of your road, you may close Sapphire.

Next page	Some calculations

tutorials/l3dt/roads/add_road_to_hf.txt · Last modified: 2017/08/31 07:32 (external edit)

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