I have tried, but not exceeded in creating a realistic looking road surface/pavement look for some roads. Basically, I just need a good look for this I can use in either a plane or terrain. It shouldn't be too hard to do, but the look just has not been quite real enough.

Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions on what to do for highway/road pavements? Maybe the basic materials provided could work, but the light, blending, etc. I just have not gotten to seem like a road surface. Are there any free materials I could download to try to see if they may work? I have looked at the Vue product site, but not found anything specific.

Any ideas would be helpful. Thanks.

Attached Link: free textures

Quote - Did you look at the above links? it's a good source of bitmap textures. If you combine it with some simple procedural texture you might get a realistic looking result.

No, I have not see those. I will check them out and see what I can come up with that may get a good result. Creating smooth floors, brick walls, etc. is not so much of an issue, but I just can't seem to get a good result for pavement on roads/highways.

Thanks for the link.

Not all of them are tileable immediately(ie you'll see a seam at the repeats) but its usually fairly easy to fix in photoshop. Ask if you havnt done or seen it done before.
Also if you need help with combining it with procedural 'noise' so it isnt too obviously repetitive.

There are a lot of different types of road out there, so lots of potential answers to this. I suspect that one aspect of it isn't the road itself but what's on it. Even with fractals or noise you are still going to get a pretty similar surface over large flat areas. Real roads typically have a drip line - the darker part in the center where all the car's have dripped oil. There will be ruts , cracking, and pitting of some level at the wheel points and dust/dirt along the edges. Again how much and what kind is going to depend upon the type of road you are doing. I haven't attacked this myself, but think it may be possible to do all these things using procedural layers and the function editor. My suggestion is to pick a specific prototype and really look hard at it. Examine all the color and texture changes and how they may relate. That should give you some places to start, or specific questions you can ask.

yes, I believe that timspfd is correct.

For our Residential Road packages at Cornucopia3d, we both purchased commercial texture bases and hand-built built asphault textures that include random tire marks (quite a lot of those if you look at a real road surface), various oil spotches, small cracks and and all kinds of things. And don't forget that the painted white and yellow strips also must be dirty in a way that matches the plain asphault. Takes a semi-significant effort in Photoshop and Texturemaker to get it right, but it can be done by anyone with enough patience and some photo references of real roads.  

Use of photos doesn't quite work because you need the ability to create a very good seamless texture (or set of textures). This turns out to be quite difficult working with a photo, but much easier if you build your own in a good image program.

It is worth doing, BTW. Those super-clean apshault surfaces you see on some road models just don't look realistic, do they?