The best way to make roads that bend and go up or down?

pieterv

I have tried the follow me and keep tool and it is indeed more intuitive and faster to use. Thanks for the advice!

@Charly2008

I have had a look at the Curviloft and Perpendicular Face plugins and they look very interesting. However, and correct me if I am wrong, I think that even though these are interesting plugins, the real difficulty lies in making the "initial path" or curve the road should follow. These tools are just another way, like Shape Bender and Follow me and keep, to make a road out of the initial path.

I have encountered a few problems making this path. If you don't do it very carefully you get things like this:

I think a part of the problem are the limitations of the curve tool in sketchup.

Does anyone know a solution to this?

Thanks in advance!

Rich O Brien

Hi Pieterv,

Have you tried 1001bits toolset? This has a 'Extrude along sloping curved path' tool which way help?

Here's the userguide.

It also has 'Slope selected edges' tool which might suit your modeling needs.

There's a 30day trial for the Pro version so no harm checking it out.

Box

And Fredo's Bezier/ Spline tool might help with your curves.

http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=13563

Plus you can bend your curves using Fredo scale/Radial bender.

pieterv

Hey Rclub24,

I have had a look at the 1001bits userguide and I think "Extrude along sloping curved path" is pretty similar to Shape Bender and Follow me and keep. Thanks for the advice anyway!

pieterv

Hey Box,

I am trying the Bezierspline tool and it looks very promising. I will try to post some examples when I'm a bit more advanced.

Thanks a lot!!

Jim57

Another way that NURBS curves are better for defining the path of the road is you can pull the handles to make them more parabolic. My understanding is that if roads are built using circular arcs, they are hard to drive. You have to pull the wheel from straight to the proper radius at an instant, instead of a smooth transition over (a brief) time.

Just a design consideration, it says nothing for modeling.

Best,
Jim

pieterv

Hey Jim,

Just to be clear, by NURBS you mean tools like bezierspline?

danbig

Another thought on a workaround:

If you can get the lines you want in illustrator, why not export to DWG from there and import into sketchup for a starting point?

pieterv

Hi everyone again!

After some testing I have figured out what the best way is for me to make roads that bend an go up or down at the same time.

I mainly use two plugins:

Fredo's BezierSpline plugin: (Of which I only use the Uniform B-Spline tool because of the smooth results for this purpose.)

http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=13563

and Wikii's Follow Me and Keep plugin: (to make a road out of the curve)

http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=16465

This way I was able to make the following interchange:

I think the main drawback for the moment is that you have to devide the curves you make with BezierSpline into really a lot of sides until they get smooth. I can be wrong, but it also appears to me that the sides are not equal destributed along the curve.

@Dabbig:

Thanks, that might be usefull too one day!

Chris Fullmer

That is a nice interchange!

wyatt

Cool. How long did that take once you figured out the right plugins to use?

pieterv

That's hard to say in fact, because I didn't work continiously at it. Let's say I worked a couple of hours every day on it for about four or five days. I find it hard to make an estimation though.

Gaieus

Indeed a nice result (from here at least - don't bother yourelf with smaller flaws like segmentation - Su is just this kind of a tool).

pilou

Remarkable result!