How to Model a Road or Highway ALONG A PATH in Blender!

what's up guys justin here with d cg essentials.com back with another blender modifier tutorial for you so in today's video we're going to talk about how to create a road um more like a highway that has like different supports that follows along a curve so let's go ahead and just jump into it all right so in order to do this we're going to need a couple different things we're going to need the profile of our road that we're going to extrude we're going to need a path that our road can follow along and then we're also going to need some objects that can act as supports that we can repeat so i'm going to start by drawing the profile of our road just by drawing this from a simple plane so i'm going to draw this plane i'm actually going to tab into edit mode i'm just going to start working from there so we're going to make this fairly simple so we're just going to make this kind of like a highway and we'll have like a median right here and i'm just extruding this out there's probably a slightly better way to do this with the mirror modifier or something like that but for what we're doing right here it's going to be fairly simple so not that big of a deal so i'm just going to extrude this up like this and then i need to give this a little bit of thickness so i'm just going to hit the a key and i'm going to tap e in order to extrude that well now what i have is i have the profile of my road that's going to follow along our curve and then next we need our curve to follow and so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to do a shift a and i'm going to add a bezier curve i'm just going to move it down here and i'm actually going to tab into edit mode and i'm going to hit x and delete the vertices and then what i want to do is i want to use this tool right here the draw tool in order to draw a freehand and so all i'm going to do is i'm just going to create a big long curve like this so kind of a smooth curve kind of like something that a road might actually follow so now what i have is i have a path and i have a profile and i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to clean this up so that my origin for my object is in the center and so now i'm just going to move this over so it kind of aligns with my road and let's go ahead and let's apply our first modifier so what i want to do with this is i want to add a modifier that's going to be a curve modifier what that's going to do is that's going to allow me to set this so that it deforms along a curve object so in this case notice what this is doing is this is actually deforming along that curve object one thing you might notice here though is this is a little bit off-center and part of the reason for that is because the object origin that i have in here is off center so i'm just going to turn this off for a second and notice how my object origins over here i'm just going to go to effect only origins under the options function right here i'm just going to move this over right here and then we can turn this back on and so notice how this is mostly better but i also want to do the same thing with this curve right here so i want to move my curve origin to that same location so notice how i'm getting a slightly better result now when i do that so now we're going to turn effect only origins off but what i want to do is i want to extrude more of these right what we want to do in order to do that is we want to add another modifier we're going to call that the array modifier and so what the array modifier is going to do is that's going to create multiple different copies of this but what we don't want to do is come in here and adjust this manually and so what we're going to do instead is we're going to change our fit type to fit curve and then we'll select our curve using the eyedropper like this and so notice how right now this is applying this in the wrong direction sometimes you can fix this by going in here and applying your rotation and scale like this so for whatever reason i think when i move this i'm not really sure something got messed up with the rotation and scale in there but notice how now this is kind of going in the right direction but this isn't actually copying along the curve and so the reason for that is because these are out of order so what i need to do is i need to move this above my curve modifier like this well now what that's doing is that's applying the array first and then it's adding the curve modifier so what this is doing is this is now following along that curve just like this and so now what i want to do is i want to model out a highway support right so like a concrete support that might go underneath this so what we're gonna do is let's go ahead and just add a let's add another plane and move this over here and for a second i might actually turn off these modifiers and i'm going to use that plane in order to model out what the support might look like so i'm just going to move this over rotate it and then start modeling so i'm assuming that in this case that we're going to have some sort of a concrete support and again i don't want to get too complicated with this for right now i'm just going to go ahead and extrude this down i probably should have been in edge select mode but that's okay i'll just delete out these two edges extrude these down i'll scale them out and then i'll just extrude them a little bit so good enough for what we're trying to do right now and then we can come back in here and we can turn on our array and our curve modifiers now we just want to do that same thing where we want to take this object and we want to apply the curve modifier and we just want to set this so that it's along this curve right well now we want to add an array all right so now we want to do the same thing but this time we want to set this to fit our curve again and we're going to set this to be our bezier curve so i'm going to click on it right here but this time what i want to do is instead of having my relative offset along the x-axis i want to put it on the z axis and if i put it at 1 right here what that's going to do is that's going to extrude this all the way along which is cool if you're creating like something with tunnels or something like that but in this case i want this to have individual supports so all i'm going to do is i'm going to adjust the z value up so that i get a higher spacing in here so notice how i can adjust the spacing of these supports by adjusting that up so what that does is that allows us to really quickly create a road along a curve like this and the cool thing about this is if we select our curve then tab into edit mode and you adjust these notice how a road will adjust along with it because this is not a destructive workflow right meaning if i do end up changing things like this this is going to move along with that all right so that's from in this video leave a comment below and let me know what you thought have you used the curve modifier for things like this before i just love having that conversation with you guys if you like this video please remember to click that like button down below if you're new around here remember to click that subscribe button for new blender content every week if you like what i'm doing in this channel please consider supporting me on patreon every little bit helps make sure you check out that link in the notes down below but in any case thank you so much for taking the time to watch this i really appreciate it and i will catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: The CG Essentials

Views: 25,335

Keywords: blender, blender 2.82, blender 2.8, blender modifier tutorials, blender tool tutorial, the blender essentials, the cg essentials, thecgessentials.com, justin geis, justin geis blender, blender 2.9, blender 2.91, blender array, blender curve, blender road, blender highway, blender road along curve, blender highway along curve

Id: RmLtV6E2TsI

Length: 8min 17sec (497 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 19 2021