How to Create any Road in Blender

[Music] okay no no we won't be doing that but in this butter tutorial we will be learning how to create custom roads by modeling them and texturing them all within blender so this is a customer Corsa tutorial from my patreon page and we're gonna be learning how to create roads like I said and these votes can be used to fill out any sort of scene or even use them for animation or even game engine we're gonna be learning how to do all of the modeling and texturing all within blender to create any sort of road you can think of so custom roads everything is possible with this tutorial and we'll be using some tips and techniques that I didn't even know we're possible a week ago so blender continues to amaze me with its cool tools and if you're interested in learning how to use some of these tools be sure to stick around to the end of tutorial where I show you guys some of the really cool texture painting techniques that I that I've recently learned but without further ado let's roll the intro and get a move on okay so we start by modeling some basic roads in blender using a few tips and techniques to make this even easier and I am gonna load in a background image but you really don't need to this is just to kind of give you guys an idea of how a road is laid out just you guys kind of know the right angles and stuff to put in your roads but after you kind of get the hang of using it with a background image you can kind of get rid of the image and continue your road however you want it to be I'm just gonna enable background images there add an image I'm going to open up my image here and there's my background image and I'm just gonna scale it up real quick so it's a little bit more appropriate to scale you guys can have us to change the scale afterwards to whatever you want to match the exact scale you're going for but just changing the size here I'm gonna go up to about 25 so we're a little bit bigger and it fills up our scene a little bit better alright so with that done we're just gonna use a simple plane to start so I'm gonna go shift a and in a plane and we're going to just land up with the middle road here I'm going to just line it up right about there and then once the origin points Center it so it's nice and organized I can close my properties tab now I'm at a minute edit mode grab that plane over to the end here and scale it up a bit larger than our road so I'm gonna go for like the road and a sidewalk all in this and like I said you don't need a reference image but this is just so you guys can kind of get the hang of how a road is laid out how that curves you know how much room to leave for turning lanes and all that but once you have that laid out you can continue your road as far as you want and not have to worry about it so I'm gonna grab those two vertices on the end there and pull it all the way to the end of my scene and with that laid out you can see that our road reference image is a little bit crooked so to work with this image it helps to rotate it just still a little bit so I'm gonna go to my rotation here I'm going to hold shift so I'd rotate it nice and slow and I'm just gonna tilt it until it is lined up nice and square as you can see that's a little bit better it still needs to go a slight bit more so I'm just going to rotate it a little bit more and go to about almost 1 about 0.9 and then we're lined up nice and good just leaving a bit of room on the edges of the road here for our curbs and sidewalks and such so with our main road and land out like that what you're gonna do is tap into edit mode and every way you want a branching Road off you know control our and you're not gonna put the cut right at the edge of the road but you're gonna put it back right as soon as you see a bit of curvature in the road it's gonna put a cut there and then I'm gonna put a cut right about here and you keep the same thing for any other Road cut you want down the road here and get it down the road that's Terrell okay another one here I'm opening one here and then this versity needs to be slid down so it's in line with this curve here this one's already in line and we'll just drop one more at the end here yeah it so now to get that nice curve in the road when they grab those two vertices here and I'm gonna extrude this and then pull it down all the way until the curve in the road here stops and it comes to be a consistent straight line so right about here is where the curve in the road stops so I'm gonna stop right there I'll zoom in here real quick and I will control our and put about a torso cuts in here maybe seven or seven would be good so we'll just put seven cuts right in the middle there so control our and then click that out now I'm gonna grab the last two vertices here and I'm gonna enable proportional editing right here you click enabled and then I'm gonna change the fall-off to be sphere so you want to choose severe for this and then if I scale it along the x-axis and then use my wheel to pull it in a bit you can see we get that exact sort of curvature that is in the road in our mesh here so I'm just gonna scale it in quite a bit again leaving just about a another meter or so in real-world size I guess on either side of the road here maybe a little bit more and then I can Center it up a little bit and we get that nice curve so the reason I'm leaving some extra room here like I said it so I can put another cut in here later and kind of put the curve in there you could be going right to this as well and then just extrude out so there's different ways to do it yes it doesn't really matter but this is just so we have a little bit more room to play with our texture paint so once you have your nice curve there you can see that looks nice and good you can extrude your last one out all the way down not forgetting to turn off proportional editing now that we're done with it so you can pull it all the way out until another curve in the road comes like we have right here let's just scale it down a little bit and then you would go ahead and do an extrude and pull it down but here's gonna be the cool part if this road just turned without continuing I'm going to show you how to do this we could use the spin tool right here so the spin tool works around your 3d cursor so I'm going to right click to place my 3d cursor actually left click I'm sorry right there and then if I use the spin tool you can see it spins our vertices 90 degrees around the cursor there so that works great for putting curves in your roads such as this right here to match it right up exactly and if you had more than a 90 degree angle or less you would change this value here and if you needed more quality you could change the number of steps for me I thought 9 steps look good and so you could just leave it at that and then extrude and continue on so it's as simple as just placing a 3d cursor sometimes you kind of have to play around with the placement of your 3d cursor to get it just right but you just basically want to line it up with this vertice and then where you want your last versity to be and imagine it from that point being swung around and that's how you get the nice sort of curves in your road so we can go ahead and finish up the rest of these roads here using that same technique grabbing the two vertices on either side let me hit Z to go into wireframe here this one can come in a little bit extruding it pulling it out until there's no more curve in the road and then go in control are putting a handful of cuts in there grabbing the last two vertices enabling proportional editing leaving it on the fall-off mode of sphere and then scaling along the X access and adjusting the fall-off with your middle mouse wheel until it fits just to the end of your selected row of vertices here and then you have your nice curve in your road and you can continue all the way on hitting Oh - turn off proportional editing then and do the same thing everywhere else you have an extra curve in your road so it's a really cool technique and it's quick and easy so you guys can model this much roads as you want now using this technique I'm just gonna finish up the roads in this scene and then we'll continue on with some more modeling before we jump into texture painting ok so I finished filling out our roads kind of matching our background image but again you don't have to you can go wherever you want and I continue to off the screen here a little bit and what we're gonna do now is we're going to and set the road so we can kind of add that curb to the edge of the road sidewalks and stuff and then we can also add something like the medium here you have here where the curb kind of splits the road here and you have two lanes so I'm going to show you how to do that as well but to start I'm gonna tap into edit mode I have face mode selected I'm just going to select and all the vertices right now and I'm gonna get hit I on my keyboard to insert our inset I should say all of our faces so because everything we have is selected Road I'm just going to use this and I'm gonna inset it a bit until it looks like it matches about where I want my curb to start so this isn't gonna match the background Road exactly right now because of the distances we put we didn't do it exactly to all the roads but that's fine because we're not I'm not really following this background image anyways and you can always tweak the scale a little bit if I want to for example just mash this up a little bit I could scale everything along do you want access and it would line up a little bit better but I'm not worried about it because the scale of this scene isn't exactly what I'm copying it's gonna be a custom road of whatever I want but if you imagine this exactly like I said you could grab these verses and fit them right to the road okay so with that said and done though I'm gonna show you now how to do something like the medium here and after we did our inset now I can go ahead and cut this out so I'm gonna hit K on my keyboard to switch to knife mode and I'm just gonna click on the edge here and you can see as I drag across I can click wherever and it will be putting vertices there so I'm going to basically cut the shape out of our road here it's just gonna be cut there a cut here cut here and then all the way across to the end so right about there so using this not just as reference I can hit return now and you can see that we have these faces basically cut in to our shape here so that's really cool and that gives us the ability to leave certain areas to the mesh different than others and now I'm gonna select everything else so alt right clicking just to select the length of the roads and in this case I'm gonna make the roads go down because usually in a city the roads kind of go downward now if you turn under like a highway or something the roads sometimes are built up but in the city of the roads will use little bit lower than the the sidewalks and etc so I'm just going around and all clicking all of our roads to select the whole road and then I'm not selecting anything of the sidewalk so I don't want to bother with the sidewalks actually these vertices at the end here those can just be deleted if you don't want to see the end of the road basically but with all those selected I'm going to zoom in here so I can get nice and close to see exactly how far I want to go and we're gonna hit e to extrude and then the Z so along with Zed access and I'm gonna hold shift so we move in a nice gradual motion and I'm just gonna pull it down a little bit you really don't want to go too far because you have to imagine this being a full road and the the curb here not being too deep but with that said and done you can see we have some depth to our C now and the the medium in the middle there and the curbs kind of show up nicely and we have some nice sort of definition to our route so now let's kind of add more of the obvious curb to the edge so usually you have your sidewalk and then a curb that sometimes is even taller than your sidewalk so to do this let's have to edit mode again I'm gonna grab my edge select and I'm just gonna select the edges wherever I want a curb so as you can see I'm selecting these edges around here I have accidentally selecting the top and bottom I just want select the bottom so I'm gonna hide everything on top by just alter by clicking the roads here I could did before if you didn't actually unselect them you could you just do that but I'm just gonna grab the roads here all the way across we just have a few here and I can just hide these no actually I'm gonna go alt I to inverse and hide all that perfect so now I just have the flat parts of our Road and this is what I'm gonna use for making the curb so like I said it wants to like the edges here all around our medium there and anyway you have a curb so I'm gonna go to my reference image here just to kind of see how a normal city has curbs and you can see your long edges here especially around the turns and stuff you have your curb so I'm gonna alter right-click and select that whole turn there and that will give us all the way along here as well but maybe we don't want the curb down here because this road doesn't look like it has one necessarily so I can just deselect the curb from this point onwards by using my middle mouse wheel and and then selecting over it so I'm gonna do the same thing over here then oops this one's like the edge so alt shift click and get just the edge there and then we have to deselect these sections whoops hitting B so just like that these like that and anyway you want to curb you're just gonna select that edge and then I'm gonna go on here right to there and over here oh my gosh let's right-click get just the edge perfect along there um and then anywhere you might be putting like a roadway or something and you don't want a curb you would unselect that face in this case I want to curb all along here but not down here this road doesn't have a curb and excited represent selecting all the faces along here that I want to have a curb and that looks good up here not so much right here we want it right about here and I can unselect that there so that will do it for now um we're gonna let that one too that will be all the curbs I need and as you can see we can edit the curbs later as well so I don't need to be too picky about it but with this selected I'm just going to hit shift D and then P and separate by selection so I'm going to tap out of edit mode now and you can see if I click here we have all our edges and we're gonna use these edges to add curbs so I'm gonna using modifier with these just go add modifier I'm gonna use a skin modifier so as you can see it's only working in one spot right now and not everywhere so to fix this I just need to tap it edit mode select everything click mark root and then unselect it all and you can see it's all a nice even science but of course it's way too big so I'm gonna do now is to have at it mode have them all selected and you're gonna go alt or ctrl a to scale down the size of the skin modifier so I'm just scaling it down really small and if I hit Z so we can have a little more definition of what's going on here and also at this point I like to turn on my my display settings here to give ourselves some ambient not a mean occlusion but well maybe it's ambient occlusion I guess right here ambient occlusion and madcap so just get more visible visible definition of where our lines are lining up so that helps quite a bit and then I can go alt say and continue scaling down until that curb is about the right size then you don't want to grab everything and grab it along the set access to pull it up just higher than our our sidewalks and stuff and you can see that gives us a nice sort of curb look to our roads just kind of filling them out a little bit adding a little bit extra detail so that is gonna do it now guys that's the modelling now it's time for the texturing so for the texturing part we're going to first do a little bit of unwrapping so let's select our main mesh again just forgetting about the curbs for now tab into edit mode and option h unhide all of our vertices now before I can start the texture painting I need to give myself a unwrap of our roads and to do that I'm just gonna select everywhere the road branches off so you can see right here right here I'm just selecting the row of vertices right before it by alt right clicking and that looks about right legal control e mark cm and that is pretty much it right here I have one more control mark scene you know if I split my window here and I bring up a UV image editor I'm gonna select them all now and I'm gonna go you and unwrap and you can see we have all of our individual roads here unwrapped but it's not really taking advantage of the size of our UV map and one of the reasons is because our Center Road is about twice as long as all of our other roads so to kind of even out the scale I'm going to put a seam right in the middle here as well to kind of cut our middle Road in half just so we can fit it in our UV image map here better so I'm going to ctrl e one more time mark seam grab it all UV unwrap and now you can see it fits the scene much better and now if you wanted to you can do some more scaling and moving around and try to get this even bigger I might do just a little bit of that by grabbing this one pulling it over here rotating it scaling it a bit or actually we want to scale them together so I'm gonna pull it in here and then grab all of them and scale them together and just fit them into this image the the bigger you can get them the better but the more resolution you'll have in your textures but it can be kind of tricky as well so that looks good enough for me and with that said and done we are ready to start the texture painting phase so here we go I have some textures downloaded and I'll link to all the textures I'll use in the description but with that said and done let's start texture painting okay it's the with our mesh selected we're gonna switch to texture paint mode and right away you can see that we're missing materials so I'm gonna do first is I'm gonna switch to cycles render just so I'm making sure we're in the right render engine I'm gonna make this window a bit bigger here as well and then I'm going to click add paint slot we're just gonna use a diffuse color now this is where it's gonna depend on how high a resolution you want your texture to be for this I'm gonna go for K so instead of typing in what four K would be I'm just gonna take the 1024 here and I'm gonna put a little asterisk next to it and four and hit return and it automatically multiplies it by four to make it four K so if you didn't know you can do math within wonder anywhere there's numbers you can do math with it just save yourself some time I'm just gonna do that and then I'm gonna give our background color I'm gonna make this mostly white as it just makes it easier to see but we're gonna be painting over it so it doesn't really matter and then everything else is good to go we can name it our road texture if we want but otherwise we're ready to go so with that I'm gonna go okay and you can see we have our texture here and we have our tools and this is the main tool we're gonna be using we'll be using the texture draw and the clone mostly so I'm gonna show you a few of the different texturing techniques I guess to achieve roads nicely in blender and most of it's gonna be changed in the brush mapping so this is the different modes you have for using your brush and to start I like to use the stencil the stencil basically works off a texture so we have to open in texture now and I'm gonna do that real quick you just hit new let's slide this over here and then if we went to our texture tab now we could see if we change the image texture to brush texture that we would have an MP slot here for an image a movie you click open and then you can open up one of your textures so for this I'm just going to try and find a blank Road right here I have a pretty Road so I'm just gonna open that up and it's a seamless texture that's important as it will blend nicely together then and as you can see we have our texture right here it's in a square shape right now and the texture I have here is a little bit longer so that's not ideal we'll have to change that but if you click image aspect it does it for you so we have our texture here now and basically the way this works is anywhere you have your texture if you click with the brush it's gonna put exactly what you see here on your texture behind it so it's it's pretty good for getting textures exactly what you want them and that's why I like to start with this brush so I'm gonna first turn off our background image now as we don't really need it let's just get in the way and now to kind of change the placement of our stencil so you don't have to do everything in your viewport you can change the placement of it by holding down ctrl and if you right-click you can change the rotation and if you hold down shift you can change the scale with right-click and then if you just use right-click you can move the placement of it so basically you can move this where if you want you can hold ctrl and move the rotation and then hold shift and move the scale you can scale it along the x-axis if you grab it along the edge right about here if I hold shift you can see if I just pull the right direction oh come on it's a little tricky sometimes you just gotta make me look bad you gotta grab right there and then you can pull it this way so otherwise you scale it along the X&Y at the same time if you go by the corner so you just kind of want to line it up by lining up right to your road wherever you're gonna be painting I'm gonna start on the end here and what I'm trying to do is lining up the edge of the road with the edge of this road because if I can get some of that sort of the edging where you have a little bit of grass coming in and stuff that's gonna give us the best results so I'm just gonna scale this down a little bit bigger or scroll my view in a little bit as it works the same way just to give you guys a little bigger view of what's going on I think it's better to scroll in and then once you have it lined up right where you want it you know change your brush strength to be a hundred percent you can hit F to change the size of your brush and then you can just click and it's gonna paint that texture right over your your background so if I move that you can see it's right there and now what you can do to continue this texture is just move your viewport down leaving the texture as it is and paint again and you can see that we have a continuing texture so this is great for getting the the basic texture and where exactly what you want it and then we can add some more variation and stuff later on so I'm just gonna roughly paint in our road here it doesn't have to be perfect but you can kind of use the the edges and stuff to get it lined up approximately and paint it all the way across here like so and I'm going to go a little bit further like so you can see that we have a nice tiling texture you can do the same thing on the bottom layer here if you wanted to change the scale a little bit again it's just ctrl + to rotate and shift to change the scale and then you would paint again so this is fine and dandy for getting the same texture sort of repeating and getting exactly the way you want it placed in your scene but I'm going to do that there but if you wanted to add some variation or if you wanted to for example take out part of this texture like you didn't want that middle line all the way along here like I'm not sure if I want that what you could do is when you use the clone brush I'm going to switch right here to the clone brush and the way the clone brush works if i zoom in here real quick is you can hold ctrl and left click and that puts your cursor there and now whenever you brush it's gonna be brushing exactly what you have there what your brush is so if we example if I swipe along here it's gonna be swiping along here and copying it down here so you can see that this is a good way to remove something that you don't want in your scene you might want to change your strengths to hundred percent and you can go ahead and paint wherever now if you want to change the fall-off of the brush that's controlled with a curve right here so you can see we have some different default curve options like if you want it to be a sharper or even sharper eight or something like this then the fall-off is going to be less but if you changed it to something like this the father's gonna be really fede so that's this is how you get more more or less like a hard brush or soft brush and you can control it by hand if you want or you can just grab a defaults template here so I like to leave it right about where we had it in the center there as it blends our textures in nicely and makes it hard to see the seams and you can go ahead and customize your texture however you like now you might also want to change they strength little bit if you don't want to be doing this a hundred percent but just kind of fading certain areas a mesh that works as well and yeah it's just a great technique for getting things exactly what you want them and feeding areas that you didn't like the looks of maybe I want to fix that area right there so I would just ctrl right click and then place my brush exactly where I want that copied and painted in you can see you can repair different parts of your texture using this technique I may make my brush a little bit smaller get rid of these lines in certain areas do the same thing right here with a different spot of texture and it's just good for tweaking your textures basically and getting it exactly how you want it so that's the one method for texture painting and that works good for sections like this but now for sections like our middle road here where we want to paint some maybe grass in we to use a different sort of brush mapping but before I change these settings because I have a set up nicely for how I'm doing these current textures and we can switch back from a texture draw and I want to change these so I want to hit the plus button so we have a new texture draw here and now I can change these without changing my other texture here so with this one I'm gonna not use stencil but I'm going to use we'll just go with view plane as view plane is going to place the texture exactly wherever you click and if you continue pulling it it's going to put multiple versions of the texture so it doesn't really work for dragging but it works good for single clicking so what we can do now also is when we hit + to open a new texture and over here we can open a grass texture so we jump in here you can see I have a grass texture right there and I'm gonna take this texture and we look kind of paint in the medium here now again you don't want to try this texture if you wanted something that you could track you would want to choose like a tiled and this is just gonna work nice to put a tiled version of our grass across our texture here and then you can zoom in and zoom out to give it a little bit of variation in the scale but this also ends up looking very tiled so you do need to do some variations in the scale and maybe even a few different textures kind of mixed into this but we're just gonna quick do a rough version here of a nice tiled grass coming in you can even kind of come in to your other texture there a little bit to blend it here and there now at this point right here you can see our UV map is a bit stretched if you want to fix that we'd have to change the UV map and unwrap it a bit to do that you will just go into a UV image editor here find the area that's stretched right in here and you'd have to pull these verses apart a little bit I'm not gonna do that for this tutorial because I would have to repaint these other things but that's just how you would fix an area like that if you found something was stretched and you didn't want it that ways you could fix it but um for this scene I'm not gonna bother fixing it if it's a close-up you were to see that but if it's kind of a distance shot you wouldn't even recognize stretching area like that so now that we have this painted for the most part across I want to add a little bit of variation and I'll still kind of want to add some more detail into our curve here our curb where we have the the ground kind of changed from cement to grass so do this I'm going to switch back to my stencil brush and I'm going to grab a new texture here so click plus I'm going to open up another texture real quick this one is another Road here but you can see we have some grass and the edges here so again these will be linked to in the description but I'm going to take this line it up on our curb here you want to click image aspect with the new texture so we get the right aspect ratio there and then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna rotate it to match I'm gonna grab the edge curb here and just line it up with our road here so we can kind of copy that same curb I'm going out a little bit here and that you just want to line this up with the edgy Road we're gonna add some of that detail and once you're happy with the placement of it right about there you know make your brush about the approximate size to fit in there for painting so right about there and then you can just go along and paint that and you can see we're adding that texture to it now this might be a little bit too strong of overlay so you could change the strength here as you paint it and then it'll blend the textures a little bit better that's something I'm gonna do and I'm gonna also zoom out a little bit so my texture is a little bit larger you could also scale up your texture either way scale or zoom out works usually scaling up the texture I guess is better because you have a little bit easier view of what you're working at I'm gonna do that line up the edge of my road or the texture I don't want to put this everywhere I'm just gonna put it somewhat to kind of blend in and I need to tune my strength down a little bit more so something like that and then just lined up with our texture there and we can paint some of that end along our road to give ourselves some texture variation and some more options on a curb I'll do the other side you just pulled across to that texture there and paint some of that in as well now for an area like this where we have a curve you could do rotate your texture by hitting control lining it up with a curve and lining up the edge of the road with that as well to kind of paint that area in and I will give you some nice results if I take that off now you can see we have some new textures being painted on and giving yourself some variation okay so now I'm going to open up one more texture by clicking the plus key and opening up a new texture this is gonna be kind of a sidewalk texture so a texture like this that might look a little bit more like a sidewalk you can open up and I'm just going to scale it down to fit and also image aspect just to fix that right off the bat and then this can be used to paint any sort of sidewalk you might have just like goo Road so you can go ahead and paint it in of forcing then want to change your strength to 100% when you're using the stencil tool on a new section but after painting that in you can go ahead and do any sort of modifications plenty of textures like before and yeah just have fun with it okay and I'm back guys I'm just kind of touching up my texture paint a little bit with the clone brush now as you can see it looks okay it's a little bit smeared here and there so I might need to do a little more detail touches but Tom basically I'm just painting a linked pavement without any sort of any sort of markings or anything yet because we'll want to apply our material texture I will want to be able to put our bump mapping and stuff to it before we apply my lays at a hundred percent before we apply the the lines because otherwise the line so you can affect or bump mapping and stuff so I'm just kind of touching up our text a little bit it looks um okay for the most part of meeting pavement it doesn't exactly look great but anyway we have like a streaky texture you might want to switch back to your stencil brush here grab your paint texture just line it up of course you want to hit image aspect if you've changed your texture like I had and then just kind of paint in more areas to fix any errors you see maybe make my strength a little bit stronger too and yeah that's about it you can also kind of do like the detail cracks if you want to put just like those cracks in your texture around the different areas depending how do you are you getting like I said you can even do this for like game design and stuff so if you want to get pretty detailed you can that you can paint you little cracks and stuff and of course your edges there as well as you can see I have our main area here kind of sidewalk and our main roads so this is good and we can continue painting on this now but at this point I'm just going to call it good so we can move on and I'm not gonna do the rest of the maps here because it's all the same process just brushing across to your your texture stenciling it's and then coming back and touching up any areas for the clone brush or by just doing more details with the stencil brush there are some different brushes here unlike the view plane is kind of nice for touch up as well if I go to my my second texture here and if I choose view plan you can kind of use this to do a little bit to touch up in different areas you can obviously touch up things that's a little bit a lot of seams if you just click once it's just gonna put the texture there so it's good protect touch up and if you want hides like tiling effects that you might get you could also do that with this brush but you don't want to click and drag because that just gives you a really bad streaky streaky look I think just to kind of fish is off random is exactly like you might think it randomizes what texture goes where so kind of cool but not really useful for getting exactly what you want in this case and then 3d is similar to tiled where it's just going to tile it depending on where you are but um so that can also be used instead of tile basically but it's pretty similar in the way it works as you can see here I have a little bit of a messy messy paint and I might just touch it up real quick with my stencil brush rotating it to the right point and then just painting in the areas that I want better maybe adding a little bit of a crack and such so you can see how detailed you can get and how it's actually quite fun painting your own map you want to remember to frequently though save your image as well I'm gonna pull it over here switch to my UV image editor and if you quit blender your whole texture paint is gonna be lost so you want to make sure that you continually go to your road texture here you see your texture all over our UV wraps here and you don't want to save it frequently just like you see if your blender project you want to save your texture as well so with that safe though I'm not gonna bother doing any more texturing on our main map here before I put the lines on it okay so once you're happy with your texture map - the lines of course and I only have certain areas that are finished here I didn't finish the whole area but like I said before I'm not gonna do it all in this tutorial I'm just gonna show you guys how to do a section like this and then you guys can continue doing as much as you want for your project but um at this point before I put the lines on it I want to show you guys how you could use this as a material and to quickly set up our materials I'm gonna use a site online that allows you to immediately generate a normal map a roughness map and a displacement map is really easy to do it online with a piece of software so the website I'm going to use is called normal map online I'll leave a link in the description but it basically is GPU powered and it allows you to open up a picture and then generate the displacement the specular and the normal map of that image so it's super handy and it's great for quick results so I'm gonna go ahead and show you guys how you'd use this texture I'm just going to open up my tutorial files here real quick the image that I just saved out right here and it will load it up for a sec it will show us what we have for K it will show us the results over here now obviously this isn't a great result why yet down here we have it rotating as well I need to make this window a little bit bigger if I want to be formatted properly there we go and I want I like to turn off the rotation because that's just kind of annoys me I know you see me but otherwise we can go ahead and start changing some settings for the second I'm going to use I don't want it to be crazy strong I'm gonna choose environment just we can see a little bit better lighting on how this road is gonna look and as you can see right now we have the displacement but it's not exactly the look I'm going for so we're gonna first start with our normal selected and we turn the strength way down we want slight bump but not crazy about um you can also adjust the level then we go up a little bit with the level and the blur I found it better to go down just a little bit with so just a little bit of blurring you could sharpen it as well and you'll get some different results but depending on your texture so this texture if i zoom in here a little bit you can see actually it looks a little bit better sharper than blurred but depending on your texture and the resolution of your texture you know I play around with this setting so I'm gonna turn the strength down a little bit more to about 1.5 and that's looking pretty good for the normal map I don't want anything too crazy so then I can switch to the displacement map and we can change the amount here this setting is pretty good at zone but again you have your blurring and sharpening and you just kind of want to tweak this to get the result you like again I'm gonna leave this just about 9:00 and I can leave this one right around zero as it doesn't really need any more contrast zero then we have our specular I'm just going to skip the ambient occlusion because I don't really need that and for the specular I'm going to turn the strength way down I don't want it to be overly reflective and you turn your mean down as well you know tweak that down a bit and arrange you can play with this setting as well this setting gives us some interesting results well I'm just gonna leave that at one so if i zoom out here now and if I change this to a plane to kind of see our floor you can see we get some really strong results right now and that's because our displacements turned up too high take that way down and other fleck tivity is still way too high it's one of the specular we don't have to turn our strength down to zero I'm not seeing my texture though oh that's Chris I have to open it of course you can load in your texture here as well to your texture map down there and now it's a bit easier to see okay that looks a little bit better so if i zoom in here real quick you can see we have our texture and now we can add a little bit of the reflectivity disk to it not too much but you can see that shine it like how it looks good and you can play around with this other settings like I said you don't really need to change these too much most of the settings are pretty good at default but you can see it's looking pretty good when you kind of look across with the light hitting it and then you might want to change your normal and displacement strengths just a little bit now you can go maybe a little bit more on your normal these settings can also be adjusted in blender so you don't need to change most of these too much but once you happy with it just kind of tweaking your displacement and this is me sure you get the right sort of displacement alright that looks about right this isn't really changing much so I can leave this as it is and then you're gonna choose to download all so there's gonna be PNG quality 100% opacity and you click download all it's just gonna go ahead and download all of your textures to your downloads folder you can see all four of them right there downloaded and now I'm just gonna go ahead and place them in my folder then I'll open them up and blender and put them on our material okay so now over in blender I'm just going to switch to object mode we have cycles already selected here and I'm just gonna open a new window here for our materials switch it to node editor and I also need a quick throw a background image in a environment map that I should say to kind of light our scene so to do that I'm just delete our default lamp there and then go to our environment settings use nodes okay so I'm just gonna open a nice sunset background from HDR Haven again it'll be linked in the description but you're just gonna want to open it up now and if I switch to rendered view here I don't really have to change anything and I'll get that nice environment texture lighting our scene if I hit five you can see we have it back there very cool so with that said and done I'm just going to switch to solid view grab our rode here and our main texture is already here it's the road texture it's added when we add the texture map and I can just delete our diffuse texture shift a-and in the principal shader because this is all we really need for this material connect it right to the base color with this texture and then we're just going to go shift a and add in a few more textures so texture image texture I'm going to add in those textures we just downloaded so let me switch to a viewport here and we'll start with the normal map so the normal map we're gonna change from color to non color data we're gonna import we're gonna go shift 8 and we're going to drop it into a normal map so this is gonna be the strength or the color of the normal map here I should say let me grab a UV map there as well then we're going to go ahead and add a vector bump node this is gonna be the normal for the bump node and then the bump node goes into normal of our principal shader now I can duplicate this texture and we're going to open up the displacement map this is going to be the height for our Bob map and now we can control this with the strength we have our displacement and our normal and that's all controlling the bump so if I go to rendered view here you can see well it looks a little weird because we have to connect it to the material output but if we do that you can see we have our road here and we have our displacement all over it it looks pretty cool but it is also a little bit overly strong so I take the strength down a bit until you get about the right amount now something right around 0.5 looks pretty cool and you get some nice-looking materials and then I'm gonna add in that last texture that I wanted just duplicating this we're gonna grab the specular map and if I plug this into the specular on our principal shader you can see now that when we kind of have a Sun setting on it you get some specular highlights on your road and you could also tweak this with the color ramp if you wanted to do more tweaking on it but I'm just gonna leave it as it is for now if you were adding puddles or whatnot you would want to control that also with the roughness map or specular map if you plug this into the roughness shader it is a bit too shiny but if you want to tweak it with the color ramp you could do that and use it in the roughness node here but I'm just gonna leave it plugged into the specular now and we just have some light specular effects so that's the main material for a road then if you want to add a material to your blocks here it would be just as simple as taking your blocks I'm gonna shift D duplicate it and move it to another layer in case I want to change it later but for now I'm gonna grab the one that I did not duplicate I'm gonna apply the skin modifier you could just tab it edit mode you smart UV projects go ahead and do that's just a basic unwrap job nothing fancy and then you could throw in a texture on it image texture again this is not gonna be holding up for a close-up shot but it is more for an aerial shot or something if you want to get more detailed you can obviously unwrap it a little bit better and throw in a little bit more detail that way but I'm just going to grab our sidewalk texture here plug it into there and then it probably will add a vector mapping there we go and then a texture coordinates input texture coordinates UV so now I can control the mount it's repeated so I can change that to 15 15 and if I switch to rendered view here it should look not too bad so you have a texture mapped across your border there and that doesn't look too shabby again you could add more details and stuff if you want to hold up for a real close up but I'm not I'm not concerned about that right now okay so now it's time for that final part where we paint our road this is pretty much the coolest part I think because we get to use some cool new blender features well not necessarily blender but new to me blender features and so yeah it's really cool and I'm excited to show you guys how to do this so we're gonna switch to textured paint and if your textures looking like that it's just because we have to switch to slots and grab the road texture there as the texture we'll be painting on and then I'll go to top view and I'm going to go back to my tools and I'm going to go to Google create a new one for this so we'll start by adding just some white lines so to do this we're gonna want a white material obviously you want a smaller brush and we'll probably want a little bit less fede of a brush so I'm gonna choose something like that as it's gonna fade a little bit less we're not gonna want to texture you can click the X on the texture and we're going to change our blend type from mix to overlay now doing this is gonna allow us if I give you guys a big example here of when we paint our white it doesn't remove the black areas so we continue to have some detail in our white and it looks more like paint first is just a solid white color on your on your texture so if I open up our reference image here real quick let me just split window here go to UV image editor and grab our reference image I guess have to it alright right here we can see some of our paint lines and I'm just going to start with doing the basic paint line across the top nice and easy a paint line white line across the top all the way to the edge so to do this I'm gonna change my stroke type from spacing which is right now to line so by changing that I can make this smaller here now I can zoom out here and I can make my brush much smaller I'm gonna have to make it pretty small for this because I want to have this whole thing line in view and I'm just going to click hold and drag you can see I have a line here and then let go at the endpoint and we get a nice straight line that won't work quite yet because we need to turn the strength down a bit as this paint is probably worn a little bit and not showing up 100% bright and then I'm gonna also zoom out and do this top line here first so I'm going down to about two pixels for this as it's very zoomed out and then just clicking holding and lining it up on the other end where we want to paint my to end and letting go we have a nice paint line straight across I think that might be a little bit big still I'm gonna zoom out a little bit more make it just one pixel do that one more time nice along the edge and we have well just still a little big so I'm gonna zoom in as that's gonna make it a little bit smaller and then one more time and we have a nice line so we can keep referencing our image here now if you want to see how the lines are supposed to be painted we of course have one along the bottom here as well let me do that one as well and this is just using the line tool and very simple this isn't the coolest part that this is cool but not the coolest part the coolest parts still coming actually so there's another line for the bottom now to do the yellow lines we're just going to change our color to be more of a yellow color you could even use your eyedropper and pick it right off of one of these textures here if i zoom in here it would be better yeah this grab that yellow color right there and then maybe make it just a little bit more yellow a little bit more enhanced okay and then we could paint we need a yellow line around our border here in the center so let me give ourselves a little bit more room we can pull this over pull this over and I'm just going to click and drag again right along here except this one needs to be a little bigger make the radius too good contract right around our center line there you can see because of the UV is being messed up we're getting a little bit of weird texturing around there but that's fine and then right there we came across like so so that's how you do those yellow lines maybe make the opacity a little bit stronger in the future but that's looking okay any other lines that need to be painted oh we have a few down here if you up here but those will come later what we're gonna do now is we're gonna use the coolest feature and that is if I come time to line I'm going to change it from line to curve now this is something I've never used before it's really awesome it's called draw curve so basically you can place some Bezier curves and then use those curves to paint a line in blender so right now I'm going to be painting this line here you can see it runs from this lane here to this lane here and in the center it's a curve where the lane switches I'm going to zoom out here and it's gonna be right in here between here with the lines twitching as you can see there to do this I have my line selected here let me I lost my page it curved I'm going to click new so we have a new paint curve here now to add a paint curve you're gonna click by holding ctrl and then you gonna left click and if you drag it out you'll have a Bezier curve like I have here and then I'm going to click one more time down here where I want the curve to end and again click and hold and drag it out so I'm gonna pull that out and get a nice sort of curve coming in here now with that place I can grab these handles and kind of adjust it exactly exactly how I need it to be but it's gonna be something right along there okay so with that curve placed you know model make sure you don't change your view too much because if you do you will lose the the placements that you put on the curve so you can I want to have you a viewport set up before you paint but with that said and done we still have our paint settings set up here from before and all you have to do is if I should slide down here you click draw curve and it will paint those lines right across the curve you have George drawn so it's really awesome to get those precise curves right we need it and then you can kind of move it around any of you port to adjust it a little bit and I'm gonna change the scale to be little bit bigger and now again come down here I can collapse this and I'm just gonna click draw curve and you can see we have the line drawn exactly we want on our on our Road so if it's not exactly how you want you can tweak it I think it's looking pretty close so I'm just gonna leave it as it is now whoops click draw curve and if you take a look at our reference image here we actually have two lines right next to each other so do this you just have to move if you pour a little bit click draw curve again and you have the two lines that you need so that is how you do that really cool and this is gonna be the same method we use for drawing the curves around our edges here so to do this I only create a new curve so I'm gonna click plus now we have a new curve and I want to do the white line across this corner so I'm just gonna click where we left off with that line drag it out we had our bco curve I'm gonna click up here as well I have to kind of move this viewport just a little bit and I'm gonna drag it out until we get the curve matching the angle in the road just the way we like it now we can tweak it like I'm going to handles like so and then grabbing this handle and pulling it out until we get the right curve in our you know easier curve here and then you click draw curve except I have to first change the color to be white and then we'll pull it down so it's not 100% white and then Drock curve you can see it's a little bit too small this time because of our viewport and also a little bit off it's gonna pull it out just the size a bit so we have to experiment with this just a little bit until we get the right size and then click to our curve that was too fat maybe eight pixels will be good and that looks almost right just a little bit too big still and this curve needs to come out just a tad like so let's try that okay and then we'll make this about six and draw a curve and then you have it we have a nice sort of curve let me go just slightly smaller still actually Google five line that up right where we want it just using G to move it and that looks pretty good now to do the other side I'm actually not sure if this will work but maybe we could just grab it scale it along the X two minus one nope you can't do that scale along like last one oh it does work so you can actually just flip it just like that I wasn't even sure if that would work but of course blender is there to save us it does and we can just do the exact same thing on the other side draw curve and you get the care of right where we want it so that is how you paint paint Alliance in blender so at this point you could do more curves we have some curves down here I want to grab this same angle rotate it around place it where you want it I found this to be really really intuitive though and really handy for a lot of these situations where I wasn't sure how you would exactly paint something like this in blender but uh of course there is a way to do it where there's a will there's a way and so this way worked quite well now we can grab that again just feel along the X minus one to flip it around to the other side and we can draw that curve as well okay that's looking looking okay and then to do the rest of it you would change it back to lion and you would click and you can change your brush a little bit too just to be the right size click and drag and do your lines like so after zoom out a little bit to do this whole line but uh that is the process guys so I'm going to do that one I'm not going to continue bothering you guys by showing you all of this you can fill in the little gaps here by switching it to just a normal space brush and painting it in already it's a little bit more but I'm yeah I'm not gonna bout showing you guys how to do all these lines now the last thing would be like the lines in the middle of the road here um if you check your texture here we have this so you do the same thing using the line tool oops line tool thank you maybe a little bit smaller and then doing the same thing where you put your legs down that's a little bit too small that up to about four and it's gonna take just a little bit of experimenting to get the right spacing and stuff but lines inner roads aren't exactly perfect if you've noticed either so um it's not that big of a deal if they're not a hundred percent exact but uh yeah this works really well to get your lines drawn out however you like now these getting a little big make em a little bit smaller and the next thing would be the markings of where you have for example an arrow like right here there's also a white line right above it so I can go ahead and add that it's kind of in line with this yellow line it looks pretty good maybe just a little bit higher okay so that was how you do something like that okay so switching back to my stencil brush I'm going to grab a new texture so click plus switch to our brush texture over here and open up and this texture is just a bent arrow again I'll include it in the description and we want to correct the image aspect ratio on it again but I'm just gonna zoom in here and let's give ourselves some more room geez get a little claustrophobic here okay that's better and let's just scale it down zoom in here and we want our arrow to be placed right inside this lane to show that it's a turn lane so if I was to paint this though just like that we would have the black in it and it wouldn't look the way we want it to but what I'm gonna do is in the change our overlay to lighten I'm gonna make my brush a bit bigger and now when you paint over it it's only painting the bright marks so you can see you can go ahead and stencil any sort of marking you need I'm gonna turn the strengths down just a little bit so it's not a hundred percent you do have a stencil any sort of text you need right onto your road for something like the lines or in arrows like this so just doing that I think it should be a little bit towards the end of this line here that gives you the control to do this sort of markings like that and then you can go ahead and rotate it does it believe we have another one over here and so you'd rotate it right there paint it right in and the lot this one is a little bit too big over here I think actually I'm sorry place it where I want scale it down a little bit right about so get the rotation right paint it and then without changing the scale so we have it consistent I would do the same thing over here and then I believe we have a line as well that would go underneath it so you guys would switch to this grabber line tool make it smaller make sure the overlay is set over there still and just like this line here we could actually copy that size we would put another straight line underneath that like so so um that is how you get a paint custom lines in blender so I hope you guys found this tutorial somewhat fun um I think I'm getting to the end of it now because I think you guys know where to go from here there are some lines in here as well if you checked our reference image real quick you would see a bum up here whoops that's not my reference image there we have it you can see that up here we have these sort of lines as well coming across the road so you guys could go ahead and do those same sort of techniques with the line overlays now you can also use the other techniques to kind of straighten up the the clone brush to kind of straighten up these areas as well if you need to do those kind of tweaks and adjustments I'm not going to bother wasting your time showing you guys how to do all that so I'm gonna stop it there and I'm just gonna show you guys if you want to open this texture back up of course you would save it here bum bum Road texture image save texture and then you would have to go to your node editor over here let's let's give ourselves some more room no editor and just open up your color texture you don't have to change the other textures unless you're going to change the the road and then you'd have to obviously but in this case we just open up a road texture again and if we switch to a rendered view close that off we'd have our lines on our road like so and it's looking as looking really cool so that's the end of the tutorial guess that's how you do it so I hope you guys have learned something had some fun along the way create some cool roads maybe add some cool environments to your textures or scenes I should say um yeah that's it hope you guys had fun be sure to subscribe and like the video blah if you liked it all and I'll see you guys in my next plenary tutorial bye bye

Channel: CG Geek

Views: 121,996

Keywords: Blender, Tutorial, Roads, Road, Custom, Beginner, easy, texture, paint, model, tips, how to, cycles, realistic, materials

Id: -QeTlna0PRw

Length: 57min 25sec (3445 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 07 2018