QUESTION What's the best way to add painted lines on track surface?

Hi guys,

Very new to track building, but using Blender following LilSki's tutorial series (which I'm hoping gets more videos at some point)

I'm capable of creating the track and modeling some terrain but I dont know the best way to add in painted lines on the track (grid boxes, track lines, pit entrance/exit etc)

I've tried 2 methods:

method 1: subdivide the visual road serface and assign a paint material to where I want the lines. (this works but looks a but unrealistic for some reason.. could be my textures.

method 2: create new 2d planes to "sit" on the roads surface, which then causes z fighting, causing me to have to raise the lines above the serface, but then they look like they're floating.

anyone care to share any best practices for this?

Thanks

 

The second method is the most common, and it just needs a bit of trial and error to find a height that won’t cause Z fighting and won’t look like it’s floating. I work in meters, so mine are usually 0.03 - 0.05 above the surface

 

i also used that second method recently, 0.03m above visual surface

here are the settings i used:

ksperpixelAT shader
alphaBLEND opacity mode






another way you'll find is to paint the lines directly on the road surface texture, beeing the easiest's one, you get some kind of a blurry effect at a far distance... but it works, some older games like gtl and RF used that method a lot... I recently helped on the Siracusa conversion and was lazy redoing the lines as mentionned above, i simply reworked on the original surface texture, cranked up the resolution (original was 256x256) and with a good multilayer shader, the result is not that bad....



use object inspector app to explore kunos's track and others to see how it's done, quite helpful

 

Thanks for the info, much appreciated.

 

Yup, 2nd method is the one that works the best for me

 

make those line-objects not CAST_SHADOWS, then they look less like floating

shader ksperpixelAT
blendmode alphaTEST
without setting object to transparent is a wee bit better for performance, but looks a wee bit worse

 

And I would put them 1.5cm above the road
then you can put the groove/skidmarks 3cm above it all

 

I put them even 1cm off ground but whatever works for you that way you don’t see clipping of the wheels on the decal