Thank you for your comments.

Carl - We had the gore area originally shown as scored concrete (see one of the previous posts w/render above) but changed that. I made a quick update to the gore area but was unaware the stripes were facing in the wrong direction. Thanks for catching that. I'm not exactly sure what you mean about every single element being drawn. The bridge and highway were lofted cross-sections and the terrain was done with spline contours and some shapes created from the abutment and wingwall edges, which I moved up and down manually to create the terrain right up against the substructure.

Glen - I've tried using the technique you described before with custom blend maps done in Photoshop. I didn't think to use a noise map...that will likely produce a more varied blend of grass materials that will break up the patterned texture (not to mention it will be a lot easier than hand texturing in Photoshop).

One more question...Underneath the bridge does not look as light as I would expect/want it to. I'm using FG in Mental Ray with 2 FG bounces. Upping the bounces doesn't seem to have much of an effect. Should I explore using Global Illumination in Mental Ray? I was trying to stay away from GI but it might be good to explore.

Thanks,

Eric Pheifer

Procedurals rock for softening tiled maps.  At least you can be assured that the procedurals themselves won't tile.  Just know that they don't import into other programs like Navis.  I have rendered proceduals out and touched them up in Photoshop to use in other programs.

You probably know that Photshop has a nifty filter that can help reduce those nasty seams.  Filter>Other>Offset.  That will allow you to paint out any seams that were on the edges using either the clone/stamp tool or heal brush.

Glen Loyd

Lead Design Visualization Specialist  | Parsons Brinckerhoff
www.pbprojectviz.com

I had used the "Offset" in Photoshop to get rid of the seams but I just realized why that didn't help: my terrain is broken up into a number of pieces. I included some of the cut and fill slopes in the cross-sections I lofted so I could get the 2:1 and 6:1 slopes accurately. Then I used the edges of the cut and fill to create a new object for the rest of the terrain in-between the roadways. The tiling you are seeing is because that is where a new terrain object and a new UVW Map starts.

I need to detach the pieces of terrain from the roadway objects and make one complete terrain object with one UVW Map. In retrospect it would be a better idea to loft just the roads and do the cuts, fills, and other pieces of terrain separately, especially because you can't really tell what a 2:1 vs. a 6:1 is from this perspective. Hopefully a lesson for others that will save some time...

Thanks for your help.

Eric Pheifer

Glen Loyd

Lead Design Visualization Specialist  | Parsons Brinckerhoff
www.pbprojectviz.com

In addition to using the clone stamp and healing tools, another good way to remove seams from textures is to:

1. Duplicate the layer.

2. Offset the top layer so that the vertical and horizontal seams are in the middle and apply a mask.

3. Using a relatively large and very soft brush, paint along the seams revealing parts of the original texture below.

Thank you to John at Neoscape for showing me this technique.

Eric Pheifer