Alternative style of network generation

[Slluxx]

I just came across this today and its awesome! I would love to use this to build "open world maps" for racing games, however the controls are a little clunky and confusing. It might make more sense and allow for way faster "development" if you could just make a piece of road and afterwards (or before generating) select what this section of road should be. This way, you can limit the amount of options visible to the user only to those things that make sense.

Just to give an example: A 2 lane road (Road_A) connected to another 2 lane road (Road_B). It would not make much sense to allow Road_B to be a highway or offramp all of a sudden. Instead, we could be able to see what makes sense and convert the road (or set the next road) according to the presets that make sense.

This way, things like the holes for grass in on/off rams could probably also be fixed (talking about #37 (comment) ) by filling them with "road" to how it is in real life.

Having the option to do whatever i want at the expense of realism is nice but it really slows down the process of generating larger networks. I know its a drastic change to the current way things work but i also know that it can be done and i am 100% sure this will help a lot of people!

[johschmitz]

I can't make any promises regarding implemtation of your ideas but I am interested to understand it a bit better. Could you describe the example a bit more in detail regarding what you expect and also maybe provide a second example?

In general it seems that you are talking about the road (lateral) cross-sections? Is this about some automatic generation of "adaptors" or something like that? A drawing might also be helpful.

[Slluxx]

Thanks for taking your time and being open to changes!

Basically, all i am saying is that the amount of options available (for templates) should be based on the previous segment of road, to prohibit things like this (and speed up the process of making roads):

Example image

This could be coupled with a way to change a piece of road after it has been drawn already. For example you have 2 highway pieces connected and you then select a piece and give us the option to swap it out for another piece that is allowed to connect (like said above) - for example an on or off ramp.

This could be more difficult with other road segments down the line, however we could just delete some pieces and redo them ourself if nessesary. The actual implementation of some kind of context menu is probably more difficult than anything else here.

Example image

( i just noticed that Onramp/Offramp LR doesnt make sense but its about the idea anyway :D )

And third, the "filling" of holes genereated by on/offramps (and maybe other pieces?) like in this image (notice my red outlines around what are currently holes):

Example image

With these changes, i can see your tool as not "just" a driving scenraio creator but almost a full fledged tool to let people create roads in blender. The current ways of doing this (array modifier or geonodes) are cumbersome, slow and require a lot of manual labor - especially if you converted them to a mesh and need to adjust them after that again.

[johschmitz]

Ah I see. I really like the first idea you mention, which is from what I understand the possibility to set the current cross section based on the "end" of an existing piece of road. I think this is indeed not to difficult to implement. Definitely something I am planning to add in the future.
Currently my time is a bit limited due to private reasons but this could be one of the next things alongside the possibility to save custom/user cross section presets.

Regarding filling those "wedges" next to the exit lane you are showing. I have thought about this one before and it was even discussed in ASAM OpenDRIVE standardization that this is a missing feature of the standard. I agree that it would be nice to fill in the gap with one click to at least have the optical aspect covered. However, currently I don't have an idea if there's a very simple logic to automatize it. Could you please exactly list the manual Blender operations you performed (step by step) to create the patches in the example such that I can compare with what I know? Maybe even add some screenshot if necessary.