Curving a road

[Railerat Aftermath]

I've been trying to make a section of road that curves to a 90 degree angle, but I have no idea how to do that without twisting the prim.

Uh.

What do, guys?

[Drongle McMahon]

What are the dimensions of the straight parts of the road? What is it made from? What shape is its cross section? What radius of curve do you want in the road?

[Blaze Borgin]

Use a tube I guess. Rez a tube on the ground, set path cut to 0.75 starting from 0.00 and add a texture to it.

What exactly do you mean by "twisting" a prim?

[Void Singer]

a cylinder twice your road width sliced with give you a hair pin 90deg

4 times your road width with a 50% hole on the same one make it gentler

do the same with a tube or flattened torus to either make texturing easier (if it's a linear pattern) or to make the road slightly curved to match whatever you are using for the straight sections

[Ceera Murakami]

For smaller roads and curve radii, a tube or cylinder, as mentioned earlier, does work. but without using megaprims, you hit a limit of a 5M radius for the outside edge.

For bigger arcs or more gradual curves, use tapered box prims, and build the arc out of trapezoidal segments. Taper on X, flatten on Y, and lay it on its side. Adjust values for taper and skew to fine-tune how the edges meet, and use a planar texture on the road surface for better control of your texture details.

Even when using tubes and cylinders, SL aproximates the curved edges with straight segments anyway. You can actually get a more graceful and smooth-looking curve with multiple tapered box prims than SL will give you from cut and hollowed cylinders, because you have full control over the segmentation.

Take a look at the curved roads at the NW corner of the "Livingston 1" sim for an example in-world. It's part of the Rutgers University sims that I built.

[Josh Susanto]

Or you can just do like everybody else and wait for mesh to solve the problem.

Mesh is the next big thing after breedables.

The next big thing after that?

NOT mesh.

[Drongle McMahon]

Well, maybe not mesh itself, but the expected accompanying increase of prim size to 64m will make this kind of thing much easier and cheaper with ordinary prims, even for quite large radius (32m).

[Void Singer]

pretty sure no one is waiting for mesh to do anything any more.... because if they are, they aren't getting anything done.

 

that and people have a short memory apparently.... V2 took ~2.5 years to be done and look what we got when it came out... I expect mesh and related options to be buggy as hell as soon as it hits the grid and a rollback almost  immediately after it's release