IMPORTANT, before reading this page, it is preferable to understand Roadscape’s lexicon first:
In depth explanation
In this chapter we will see what are Roadscape modifier menu’s fields and what they are responsible of in the process.
Let’s dive into it!
Roadscape’s Menu explanation
First, note that each field that is marked with a ⦿ icon in its name means that this field is required in order for Roadscape to work properly.
All checkboxes that aren’t marked with the icon aren’t obligatory, they represents additional features that will not impact the functionality of the addon.
Why are these obligatory checkbox fields here in the first place if they are needed for the system to work properly you might say?
Well, because turning some of these OFF while working on a large scene could heavily improve the performances of Blender, but of course you would need to activate them back whenever you want to turn the generated geometry into real geometry, so yeah, this is why we have these checkboxes.
Ok now, on with the settings.
- Legacy mode: Legacy mode is the default Roadscape v1 system, this system will not merge the Support mesh with the terrain but rather make the terrain meet the support mesh’s position.
Legacy mode often requires more terrain subdivision levels in order to get the same result as Roadscape v2 (Legacy mode turned OFF).
But legacy mode will better preserves the quad topology of the terrain.
So this is a trade off, either you go for more performances with legacy mode OFF, meaning less poly count and a faster Blender performance overall, or you go with legacy mode and the system needs more subdivision but keeps the terrain almost as quad based as it originally was.
- Max Terrain Height: This field is meant for you to insert the max height of your terrain in meters. This value is important because beyond this value, the system will stop working. Meaning that if you set it to 2500 but your max terrain height is 5000 and you draw a road beyond 2500m of altitude, the system will not function beyond this value.
Note that there is no need to insert the exact max altitude value of your terrain, simply a max height range within which all of your terrain’s geometry resides in.
In our example, our terrain max height is something below 2500m, as we can see, each square on the 3D viewport grid represents a 100m length, so our terrain is roughly 900m of max altitude, therefore setting up a value of 2500m is surely enough.
- Draw Terrain: Required performance/designing related field. Turn this field ON in order for Roadscape to render the terrain, OFF to mask it.
- Draw Final Roads: Required performance/designing related field. Turn this field ON in order for Roadscape to render the final roads mesh, OFF to mask it.
- Draw Guide Roads: Performance/designing related field. Turn this field ON in order for Roadscape to render the guide roads mesh, OFF to mask it.
- Draw Support: Required performance/designing related field. Turn this field ON in order for Roadscape to render the support mesh, OFF to mask it.
- Terrain Smoothing: This field will apply a smoothing factor to the terrain that is within a specified distance in meters from the road mesh.
NEW in 2.02: Terrain smoothing now features an iterative process, meaning you can modify its strength, 0 is equal to OFF, and you can go to unlimited steps.
(Remember that smoothing operations within Roadscape are some of the most performance taxing ones).
- Terrain Subdivision: Required performance/designing related field. Turn this field ON in order for Roadscape to apply terrain subdivision based on distance.
Roadscape features a 3 steps local subdivision features with custom distance thresholds for each one.
You will find these thresholds fields later in the menu.
In this example we can see the terrain subdivision taking place depending on distance thresholds:
- Support Subdivision: Required performance/designing related field. Turn this field ON in order for Roadscape to turn the Support’s mesh subdivision ON.
- Smooth Path Mesh: Smoothing the path mesh will result in the subdivision of the curve used to draw the roads mesh.
If turned OFF, the generated road mesh will strictly follow the path mesh vertices as in this example:
We can see that the generated road mesh is strictly basing itself onto where the path mesh’s vertices are placed in space.
Now, if turned ON, the generated road mesh will follow the path mesh vertices position but in a more loose and smoothed manner, resulting in a very different road generation, sometimes it is useful to go either ON or OFF, that is why the option is there.
- Support + Terrain Merging: Required performance/designing related field. This field is responsible for merging the support mesh with the terrain mesh when not using Legacy mode.
- Clean Up Support + Terrain Merging: Required performance/designing related field. This field is responsible for cleaning up the mess that is generated when merging the support mesh with the terrain mesh when not using Legacy mode.
- Path Mesh Smoothing Factor: Factor responsible for defining the amount of smoothing the path mesh will receive if Smooth Path Mesh is turned ON.
I recommend not to go beyond a factor of 2, there is no real reason to go beyond it since a factor of 2 will most likely represent a 100% smoothing efficiency.
- Terrain: This field is where you should input and select your original terrain mesh. Roadscape will render your terrain on its on afterwards in order for the system to work. Therefore you don’t need to keep your original terrain mesh visible in the viewport in order for it to be displayed.
Roadscape will take care of that.
- Raycast Blend Factor: The raycast blend factor is the factor that defines by how much you want your path mesh to automatically stick to the terrain or not.
– A factor of 0 will let you completely set the path mesh elevation manually.
– A factor of 1 will make the path mesh to strictly stick to the terrain mesh, meaning that the path mesh elevation will be strictly dependent on the nearby terrain mesh elevation.
- Road Meshes Subd Level: This field will define the subdivision level of your Guide roads mesh.
It is recommended to set a value that will be the same as the value you will use to subdivide your generated Final roads mesh after Turning Visual Geometry to Mesh.
- Support Meshes Resolution: This field will define the subdivision level of your Supports mesh. I recommend a value of 3.
- Intersections Roads Merging and Intersections Support Merging: Do not pay attention to these fields. Better not to modify these values, they are accessible in the current version of Roadscape but will disappear in future versions because they shouldn’t be messed with.
- Roads Z Offset: This field is reponsible for applying a slight Z axis translation offset to the generated road meshes compared to the Support mesh. Resulting in a road mesh that is placed slightly above the surface of the Support mesh.
I recommend a minimum value of 0.100, which is 10cm.
You can go as low as you want but terrain will start clipping heavily if you go below a 0.05 value, meaning 5cm.
- Distance Based Subd Levels: These fields are responsible for defining the terrain subdivision levels and within which distance from the generated road mesh they are effective.
So the Far Subd is the first subdivision step, applying a subdivision factor of 1 to all faces that are within a 75m radius from the generated road mesh.
Medium is the second layer, applied within the specified radius and with a specified level.
And same goes for the Close layer.
- Support + Terrain Merging: This value is very important and represents the distance threshold within which the vertices that have been generated during the support and the terrain mesh merging will merge together in a last step, resulting in less errors and terrain holes.
The value is in meters and is multiplied by 2, 4 and 8 in a custom merging system, that should prevent for a terrain geometry mess.
This value will change with the size and mesh resolution of your terrain mesh, and a lot of other factors, therefore it is recommended to play a lot with it, try at first a low value such as 4 and you can go up to 24 or something. There are no reasons to go beyond that.
Personally I found that a value of 12 is working great in most of the situations I come across.
- Smooth on Support Boundaries: Check this ON in order to apply a smoothing factor to the generated support + terrain merged geometry (namely the final terrain mesh) within a specified threshold distance defined by the two following fields.
Smooth on Sup Boundaries Distance: This threshold value defines how far from the support mesh boundaries the terrain will be smoothed up.
Smooth on Sup Boundaries Safe Zone: This threshold value defines within which distance from the road mesh this last smoothing operation will NOT take place.
It is basically a safe zone, that will prevent this last smoothing operation to smooth up the parts of the terrain that are within its specified value from the generated road mesh.
NEW in 2.02: as for Terrain Smoothing, Support Boundaries smoothing now features an iterative process, meaning you can modify its strength, 0 is equal to OFF, and you can go to unlimited steps.
(Remember that smoothing operations within Roadscape are some of the most performance taxing ones).
- Building Support: This field is a collection field, meaning you input and select a collection. This collection should contain Support meshes for buildings that you can to place on your terrain and for which you want the terrain to take in account for its modification.
Building support meshes should be placed on the ground level of the buildings, and there should be one mesh per buildings. It is also recommended to scale the building support meshes to be slightly wider than the building so that the terrain correctly adapts itself to create a more realistic result.
IMPORTANT: This feature is heavy on performance so there is a checkbox in order to activate it:
Meaning that, as long as you don’t check that checkbox ON, the system will not make the terrain adapts itself to the building’s support meshes even if you select a Building Support collection.
This was made in order to prevent massive unwanted freezes that could cause you to loose your work if not saved.
- Assign New Terrain Material: This field will assign a new material to the original terrain, disable it if you wish to keep an already textured terrain.