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Junior Member
 
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Last Login: Tuesday, June 14, 2011 5:14 AM
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| Hi all, I have two questions related to lane striping and bridge fencing. 1) After applying an edit poly modifier to my highway road lofts, I loop select the striping edges and make a bunch of lines. Those lines do not always have the same start point, so sometimes the sweeped dashed lines do not line up. How do you guys handle this? I have been adding a ton of additional materials for each stripe that contain the same dashed line alpha map, but I offset the alpha map until the lane stripes line up. There has to be a better way to do that. I hope this question makes sense...if not, please let me know and I will upload a test render. 2) Please see the bridge test renders. The fencing is not really showing up in the overall aerial rendering, even with high image precision settings. It is simply an alpha map over a black diffuse color...nothing special for now. Do you know what steps I could take to make the fencing show up in renders from a distance, or at least have them look black and reveal less of the posts behind the fence? Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks for your time! 
Eric Pheifer
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"old dog"
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| Sorry for the delayed response. I'm finding that I need to re-subscribe to several forums since we shuffled them around. Okay, to answer your question. Sweeps will always start at the first vertex of the spline. In this case, your two striped lanes are slightly offset by the stop bar at the far end. To get them to be the same, just swap the vertex order. That should get them to line up. Similarly, if you are using a custom shape, the mapping will start at that splines first vertex. Changing the vertex order can be handy with some objects like oil streaks. You can get some randomness even when using the same map. It's a little bit like "flipping" the billboard trees. BTW, great looking bridge model!
Glen Loyd
Lead Design Visualization Specialist | Parsons Brinckerhoff
www.pbprojectviz.com
 
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Junior Member
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Last Login: Tuesday, June 14, 2011 5:14 AM
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| Thanks for the response! I finally figured out the vertex order for the lane stripes (see attached) a week or so ago. Your tip about changing the vertex order to induce some randomness seems like a great idea. I'll have to try that out when I get around to adding oil streaks, more striping, and cars to the model. 
Thanks,
Eric Pheifer
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"old dog"
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"old dog"
Group: Administrators
Last Login: 2 days ago @ 4:04 PM
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| Oh. Second answer (the fence alpha). I'm betting that it has to do with the anti aliasing. Check out Tom's rant about Bitmap Blur: http://www.pbviz.com/forum/Topic2343-9-1.aspx I have "cheated on some fences that are in the distance and just made them a simple grey material with transparancy. Saved in render time and the camera never got close enough to really notice. Since the fence is about 90% negative space, it would appear about 10% opaque. |
Glen Loyd
Lead Design Visualization Specialist | Parsons Brinckerhoff
www.pbprojectviz.com
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Veteran
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I was going to mention the bitmap blur. try turning your bitmap blur (on your alpha and your diffuse, bump, etc.) to .01 and see what happens. you can also try turning off filtering for the opacity map and seeing if that makes ti look sharper.
THOMAS SHANNON
SENIOR DESIGN VISUALIZATION SPECIALIST
PB Project Visualization
http://www.pbprojectviz.com/
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Junior Member
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Last Login: Tuesday, June 14, 2011 5:14 AM
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Here is the updated render with the bitmap blur turned down to 0.01. Please let me know what you think.
Thanks!
Eric Pheifer
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Newbie
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Last Login: Wednesday, June 08, 2011 8:37 PM
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| Looks good. Is every different piece of the project modeled? I mean was every single element drawn? My only comment is engineering. The paint striping on the lower on-ramp is incorrect. I attached the pages from the MUTCD for reference. An easy way to remember the direction of the chevrons are that they push the driver back into the lane. The left ramp chevrons are pulling the vehicle away from the lane. The only hiccup I am having with drawing my interchanges is the fill slope wrapping around the under side of the bridge. Carl
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"old dog"
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"old dog"
Group: Administrators
Last Login: 2 days ago @ 4:04 PM
Posts: 646,
Visits: 4,053
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