I'm inspired by a song about a car and would like to make a nice scene of a curvy road (not straight) through the hills but unsure how to make the road. Should I: Make room for it in the render and paint it in post production Or find a way to incorporate as a 3D file to use in other projects I think I could handle painting it manually but making it 3D is a bit too challenging for me at this time especially since I'm having difficulty even making candle holders from scratch. lol Any ideas?

I think you should try by Vue, try contructing a curvy road with the terrain editor then placing it into your mountain terrain. Sharen PS You will get better ideas soon, this was just mine

Hi, Velvet' ! I think Sharen's Idea is the best, and more easy than create your road in a 3D application. I can only propose a different way to make it with more control on your job : Make your first terrain and export it as a JPG or BMP. Save and close your scene. You can now open and edit the picture in any image editor to add your road manually. Then, open your saved scene and create a second terrain with your image. This method will probably need a few trys, but you can obtain good results... Hope this can help you... Maybe someone will have a better idea...

I did a custom greyscale bitmap in photoshop for a dirt road terrain. It came out ok, the only problem was I had to use vegetation to hide the edges of the road so it didn't look like it was raised above the rest of the ground. If you want an asfault (sp?) road though, you might want that look. Rich

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=84885&Start=1&Artist=Cowboyuk&ByArtist=Yes

You could always try making the ground plane the road then create terrains and place them around where you want the road to go. When you create the terrains, use the clip function to round off the edges,and then place grass,etc around to create the look, that's how I did the corner on this pic. May not be what your looking for, but, it may give you an idea.

heyas; i did a quickie short bit of road on my latest pic. it was on top of a plateu, so it wasn't too difficult. doing a windy road over hills and mountains mighte be tougher. i duplicated the terrain and gave the second one the road (actually cobblestones) texture, then shrank it down on the z (vertical) axis. then i went into the terrain editor with the original terrain (with grass material) and set a shallow 'dig' along where i wanted the road to be. keep in mind that it is hard to see where what is on the terrain preview, so it might be a good idea to try to paint it in the 2d app, like bop suggests.

Thanks you guys!!! I didn't expect this much of a response. :)

"Thanks you guys!!! I didn't expect this much of a response. :)" We Vue users is friendly folks! ;) Laurie

Attached Link: http://members.tripod.com/~ggbe/beginners/river.html

I found this tutorial for creating a stream through a terrain and will attempt to use it for my road. Just thought I'd share this if anyone needed it.

This is a great tutorial, I used it once myself. Good searching. Sharen PS: can't wait to see what you come up with.

Well I didn't follow the tutorial... this time. I made a b&w jpg and used it in the terrain editor and came up with a basic curvy road. Here's my attempt at asphalt. This is a WIP. Just used one of the default sunsets and slapped the road on and put my custom texture on it. What do you think of my first official WIP? :)

Attached Link: http://www.find.com.au/tutorials/3dsoftware/vuedesprit/

Oh and here's the link where I found the tutorials.

Cool! I like the meandering aspect of this road! :)

This looking good... now, I want to see the final result of this research ! (Well... I am an art student and we're always thinking through researchs and results... excuse me ! :-)) And, I want to say that, if I agree with what Laurie said, "we are friendly folks" don't talk about it ! Everyone think we are ugly little rats... :-) Now, you're a newbie, as yous said, and I want to welcome you in this wonderfull community !!!