I'm taking a quick break from the big animation project, which is coming along slightly better than the last time I posted, and am working on a scene that may or may not be animated. I'm using to terrains to simulate each side of a river. I plan to have a few wheeping willows on one side along with a dirt (maybe cobblestone) road that follows the terrain, and in certain places slighly lower than the surrounding terrain. Now this is my problem: How do I create the road to follow the terrain? Thanks again for all your help. I'm hoping that the solution is easy and it is something my just missing, but I have never shrunk away from hard work if the solution is hard. Although if the solution is hard would it be possible to get a few screen shots to go with it. Sincerely, David

Yowsa! I saw your post and realized that I hadn't done anything with your request for animated water. I haven't had time to do a tutorial on it yet so here is the next best thing - the actual Carrara file I made the demo movie from. The Carrara file that is linked is not actually a movie file - it's a .zip file with the suffix changed to .mov so I can upload it her. Download the file, change the suffix to .zip and then decompress the Carrara file. Now, back to your question. Here is one way to do the road described in your post. Convert the procedural terrain map into a texture, export the texture, open in Photoshop, isolate a gray at the "right" elevation using the adjustment layer of Contrast or Levels, use the selection to make a mask to work within, draw a path for your road within the masked area, convert the path to a selection, fill the selection with a gray, save and import back into Carrara. Whew, long answer. There is a way to create very narrow bands using the terrain shader itself by making selections using altitudes. That works ok for fine natural detail like shoreline, however, it's a little too irregular for a road in my opinion. If this makes absolutely no sense, post back and I'll put something together on Sunday. Good luck! Mark

Hummm... really cool idea. I will try it here.

Hi Mark. Thanks for posting the carrara file with the animated water. As for your answer regarding the road, I have read through it several times and sadly I just don't get it. David

http://www.daz3d.com/support/tutorial/tutorial.php?id=1879

You may find this Bryce tute of some learning value for a road.