Welcome

This program carves roads into grayscale terrain maps. The road will rise and fall with the terrain with cut and fill just like a real road. After the grayscale map is modified, it can be saved and imported into 3D programs like Bryce and Vue. Road Maker also creates road texture and alpha maps that can be used in your 3D program to provide a road texture that is different from the rest of the terrain.

New to version 1.1 is the ability to have more than one road and to have one intersection. There are also some refinements to the road sizing routines to better handle terrain smoothing in 3D programs like Bryce.

Road Maker uses grayscale terrain maps. A limitation of this approach is that the terrain is defined by a rectangular grid of square pixels. While this works well for perfectly horizontal or vertical roads, it is not ideal for curved roads. As a result of the grid, road edges can look jagged in close ups. This is especially true of the road textures. A future commercial release of Road Maker will be based on 3D meshes to overcome these quality limitations.

To learn to use this program, first review the section below that describes the Workspace.
Then review the information about Creating Roads.
Finally, read about importing the road into 3D programs like Bryce.

Contents

Workspace

• Workspace Layout
• Road Icons
• Hot Keys and Mouse Shortcuts

Creating a Road

• Starting a New Road
• Road Design Tips
• Road and Curb Height
• Road Smoothness
• Add a Second Road
• Add an Intersection
• Reusing Road Designs and Templates

Saving and Using Image Maps

• Saving Image Maps
• Using Maps in Bryce