Im trying to do a scene where a car is driving down a road and the camera flies in from the distance, just above the road, then catches up with the car and goes up to the cars driver side window to see a green screen comp of the real footage of the person driving the car.

My first problem is putting a road in the scene that cuts through the terrain realistically. I have seen a few scripts and tutorials, but Im having trouble understanding them. Is there any one who might be able to show me the proper way to make a photo realistic road?

Rob

first: i have no experience with roads in vue :-) having said that ... i have often heard that to create roads in a "controlled" manner a lot use GeoControl2 and export the generated terrain from there to vue ... i know there (www.geocontrol2.com/e_index.htm) in the forums you might find video tutorials that might help you in the right direction.

Rutra has an excellent  tutorial in a few sections that shows how to create a road. I don't know where it was moved to. I'm sure he can tell you.

Attached Link: Making of Sic-Transit

Thats interesting. Have you seen any that show asphalt roads?

i have found this www.geekatplay.com/tutorials2.php (number 53 and 40) at geekatplay. there might be more ...

Here is a little information that might be of use to you.  As "Buzz and Woody", another model-builder and I have started working on a construction set for "Rural Roads", --  attempting to make a photo-realistic set of models for people who need to make high-quality road scenes in Vue. (See sample image above.) So, we have been giving quite a lot of thought to the problem of how such road-making might be done.

What we know is that the problem of how an ordinary Vue'er might make long sweeping roads across a typical rural landscape is one of the most formidable technical problems that exists in current generations of Vue. 

Here are the instroductory paragraphs of the "user guide" I am drafting for what will become our "Rural Road Package" 

Thats the biggest problem. When you make a terrain the average person would build a road that hugs the ground, up and down mountains and so fourth. In vue even using the python script  for roads, it simply rasies the terrain to a specified height, so it you want a road that wraps around a mountain from bottom to tip it cant be done.

I hope someone fixes this, because as a film maker I was looking to VUE to do a shot that would cost $40k if done in real life. All the things Vue can do and something as simple as a road is almost impossible.

Here are the introductory paragraphs I've written for the 'user guide'  of our soon-to-be 'construction kit' for Cornucopia3d. I hoping that these paragraphs might help to explain the technical nature of the problem in simple, easily understandable terms.

"In the ideal world, to make a photo-realistic scene or animation with rural roads, it should be possible to first construct a terrain that one likes, and then lay out a road or set of roads along the contours of that terrain. A person then should be able to apply a high quality road bed and road surface to the contours of the road and add objects such as bridges, culverts, elevated roadways or other objects where needed, while having the road surface flow easily over those objects.

Unfortunately, it is not yet possible to build a convincing, photo-realistic road across a Vue terrain in this manner. The ability to do so in this seemingly intuitive manner presents a number of formidable challenges. Without going into the technical details, several kinds of additional technologies would be required that don’t yet exist in Vue. First, there would have to be a separate computer program capable of analyzing any given Vue terrain and determining a more or less level path across the contours of the terrain, in the desired direction that neither rises nor falls too sharply. These kinds of programs (“network analyses”) exist, but even when they are used, natural terrains still present some mounds and some dips that require “cut banks” (incisions into the mounds) and “fills” (areas of built of rock and soil) to create a road bed that is relatively level. So, a second technology would need to be available for the Vue program to automatically construct cut banks and fills along the roadway laid out by the network analysis program.

Finally, there is the matter of a realistic roadbed and road pavement. This might be made by using a Vue material, but a photo-realistic road surface is slightly convex, and a gravel or coarse asphalt roadbed typically lies under the pavement, and extends beyond it on both sides. The road surface must be continuous and must be capable of extending across bridges and culverts or other structures, implying that it must be an “object”, rather than a simple material.

It is possible to construct these features into the Vue program in the future, but for the present, the needed supporting functions do not exist. Therefore, we are taking a different approach to the matter of “rural roads” for the present.

To make it possible to easily build a scene or an animation-capable scene with rural roads, we take the approach of first building a road segment or system using a set of building-block objects, and then building a terrain around the “road” using one or more discrete Vue terrains."

Without going further into the details of our project (unnecessary for your project), essentially, we are building a reasonably extensive set of objects that can be assembled in different ways to form a long segment of rural roads that could climb up hills, go across valleys and across streams and around waterbodies. The building blocks of the system consist of various kinds of rural road elements, each of which has some portions of a “terrain mesh” attached to it. Normal Vue terrains in the Vue program can be merged into the road segment on either side of it so that when all the terrain pieces are given the same materials, the final assembly gives the appearance of a rural road laid naturally into a normal landscape.

I think this is the approach you might find that you need to adopt to accomplish your stated goal. That is, build  your road scene with road segments that you construct somehow, merge and butt-up chunks of your chosen type of terrain into those road segments, and then build out the terrain surrounding the road.  Basically, this is the only approach we've found that will lead to photo-realism, and also to a decent animation possibility.

Cross-posting a little here, I think.....

Rob, it is not a "simple fix" that someone can easily incorporate into the next release of Vue.  

If we want to get technical about it,  it is possible to begin with a "heightfield map" for a terrain, (you're probably familiar with the concept of a heightfield map?), and then use a network analysis algorithm and quite a lot of the programming tools that go with that, to "plot" an optimal path across that heightfield (actually, just a table of height values) that would describe where the road would lie. A familiar technology for any of us with a technical geographic information system background.... And then, using various other procedural tools, actually form up the road modelling segments.  But these are technologies costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they require high order technical skills to implement. Not something that someone is going to just plop into the next version of Vue.    (Laughing, and I don't want to do it - a kind of work I did for years and hoped to have retired from forever.)  But this is why I'm sharing this with you. Having worked with the kinds of analyses and programming needed for this, I concluded that we don't want to go here.  This is not an appropropriate path to take for several years - at least not for a piece of software like Vue that is must be priced at under $5K per copy.

Ok, so build the road in another 3d modeling program, import a terrain into that program, use a drape function like cloth to lay the road on the terrain, then export the road into vue and paint the eco system around the road?
That is something I can do in 3dmax. I just need to make sure the road is thick enough to protude through the terrain when back in vue and the cloth material in 3dmax is thick enough not to pick up the minor bumps in the terrain.

 And unfortunately, Buzz and Woody cannot help you here yet. We hope to have our "Rural Road Construction Kit" out in early March, and are making real progress, as shown in that little picture above, but we are working on some technical issues of our own. For example, it is easy to describe "attaching general purpose terrain meshs" [ to our bridges, road segments, etc.] "that mesh seamlessly with other terrain pieces you would place to either side..."  But, it is not so easy to construct such a kind of terrain mesh.  However, we still expect to have a decent kit in March for the purposes of people, such as yourself.

 OK, I am a Maya modeller myself, so you are close, but if I could nudge your thinking a little bit.

What we have done is to first build some standard asphalt road segements (making sure your have some high quality asphalt textures with tire markings, dirt and appropriate line painting for your country. Not planes - some "boxes" with some depth, because you are going to need to include the road margin areas in your textures.

Then whatever other objects you need - in our case, a long series of models of bridges and culverts, etc. All with some road/asphalt segements laid across them.

Then, you could export some terrain pieces right out of Vue and into MAX, tweak them so that they fit well underneath, against and along side your road segments.

Finally, build your actual long road stretch for your scene in Max - put everything together the way you want it.

Then, export that whole set of objects out of MAX as *.obj files, and import into Vue. Now, build out the rest of your surrounding terrain in Vue. And all the rest of your scenery elements.

Clear?