Mapping: Making an Airbase

[Rhino]

Updated the OP With this Extra Mini-Tut on how to do Taxiway Splines


Taxiway Splines Mini-Tut

Since the above info isn't very detailed here's a bit more detail on how I would recommend people to do their taxiways etc.

Here is a really quick little taxiway I've made for this example:


Now first thing you want to do is draw your Line Spline. Go to Create>Shapes>Splines>Line and you can start placing vertex points down, and I would recommend doing it on the Grid:



Then its time to sort out your spline settings. Go to the modifier tab and check "Enable in Render", Enable in Viewport", "Generate Mapping Cords", "Real World Map Size", switch from Radial mode to Rectangular Mode and put in the settings you want for your taxiway. I recommend a very large height/length to make it easier to select later, and a width of 0.5m (what I used on Bastion). Then its a matter of moving your spline down so its only a little bit above the surface of your runway but enough to easily see it without it zfighting with the top.


Now its a matter of refining the vertex point placement of our spline:



Now for smooth corners there are a few ways of doing this, but the simplest is to turn the central vertex from the default "Corner" point to a "Smooth" point by right clicking with it selected and hitting Smooth, which then makes it smooth:



As you can probably see thou there is far too smooth with more edges than we need, which isn't good for performance, so in order to ensure our model is optimized we need to reduce the amount of edges we have. Expand the Interpolation tab and set the number of steps to something that keeps your corner semi-smooth, but still being somewhat optimized. I'm going to pick a setting of 3 for this spline and you can see the taxiway is somewhat smooth, but only has 8 segments now:


Now if we do the same thing with the other smaller corner you will notice with the same step settings in its interpolation that the smaller corner is much smoother than the bigger one, which is bad since we want to keep the same level of smoothness between them, in relation to their size. Unfortunately we can't have different Interpolation settings between different points on the same spline, but there is a few ways you can get around this.

The first is to make each corner, with a different size, its own spline, which then allows you to change the interpolation step settings between them: and connect them up later on.



This method however dose break the Automatic UVs:

It should be something more like this:


The Second option is to optimize it later on, after you convert the mesh to editable poly, and then either collapse edge rings, or remove edge loops:
Edge Ring Collapse:




Loop Removing (Remove by Ctrl+Backspace once edges are selected):


Both of these methods will perverse the Automatic UVs, if done correctly:


The Third Option is not to use Interpolation at all and just do the smoothing by hand with individual vertex points, but this is very time consuming and isn't perpetually accurate so I wouldn't recommend it, but dose give you the most manual control:


Which ever way you choose its up to you, best to try all three and see which works best for you, but the important thing at the end of the day is to keep things optimized


Once your spline is done, Convert it to an Edible Poly, Select all the bottom faces, leaving just the top ones, and delete them:



Then move your left over top face to be in line with the top of your taxiway:


Then switching to your taxiway static, with it being 3D and having side faces like my one dose (doesn't need an underside and if it dose you will need to delete it before exporting at the very latest), select all the top faces and delete, leaving only the edges:





Now its a matter of Bridging faces between your taxiway line and your airbase sides, I recommend using the Bridge Tool but you can create faces to "bridge the gap" in other ways too:





Once you have closed up bits you can also use the Cap tool in Border Selection mode to "Cap the hole" and then you can define the edges manually like so:




Once your done you should have something like this:


Which then its a matter of just doing the UVs and we only define the taxiway in the colour channel, in the detail channel it uses the same UV as the rest of the runway. Now if you recall we asked the Spline Tool to do an Automatic UV of the taxiway line and if we look in the UVs we can see it, although messed in with the rest of the runway UVs from when we connected the taxiway line to the main mesh.


We want to break the Taxiway Line UV off, by selecting it, right click in the UV window, hit Break and then move it away:


Then we want to do a UV for the rest of the runway, not touching the taxiway line since its UV is good:


Then its a matter of packing our colour UV layer so the Taxiway line has its own little spot on the UV, possibly with other Taxiway lines overlapping it that's fine (although dose remove some flexibility in what you can do with the colour textures so not overlapping them is best if you can). Since this isn't a proper model that is actually going to go ingame I'm only going to do a very basic and un-optimized UV pack:



And then a very basic colour texture:


And if we apply this colour texture to the model we get what we are looking for, the yellow taxiway line on the taxiway with two different concrete colours and a tiny bit of dirt painted on the colour texture too:


Happy Days