Modeling roads

Hi there [smile]

"I also want this to be very visually attractive, probably through the use of shaders further up the road."[grin]

The terrain could probably be done quite easily using NURBs or similar, unless you're looking to create realistic environments modelling local geography then any "good looking" algorithm should suit you fine. Just remember that from the perspective of a driver/car, you can get incredible draw distances - so a level of detail algorithm might well be on the cards; even more so if you have a lot of urban geometry and vehicles.

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I'm also afraid that it might be a little tricky setting up the merging lanes and other complicated lanes using a B-Spline system since that is only keeping track of the curvature of the road.

I personally wouldn't use B-Spline's for roads. I would use a complex system of waypoints and a interpolation techniques. I've used "Catmull-Rom" and "Hermite" splines for path finding algorithms before - I like them a lot more than b-spline's because they fit the control points much better, give you a lot more control.

With a grid of waypoints and a selectable interpolation method you could easily get a combination of curved roads and dead-straigh roads/junctions. Also, with a suitable level of detail you could probably model all of the main types of road junctions.

Another bonus of a tightly controlled waypoint system is that you can quite easily model AI and/or general movement - having a set of waypoints for each lane in a road makes it trivial for vehicles to follow the road network. Lots of possibilities for pathfinding and the like.

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I don't have much experience with AutoCAD, but I've toyed with the idea of modeling my world in there. If anyone has experience with AutoCAD, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that as well.

Using an existing tool is always a definite plus-point; but I'd be a little cautious of jumping into this.

I say this with reference to my previous point of building a graph of roads. If you can export this information, brilliant [grin]. However, loading a "3rd party" model and trying to then add the road network information could well become as complex as writing your own world editor (of sorts)...

hth
Jack