How To Smooth Roads?

[danwilkie90]

I created a path on Google Earth following a road I want to use, added elevation with GPS Visualizer and then imported it into Bob's Track Builder, but the road has so many sharp creases and random lumps that's it's literally undriveable, the shape of the road and the elevation changes themselves are correct but the bumps make it look like corrugated iron or something.

Does anyone know a way to smooth roads out while keeping the elevation changes and such?

Thanks!

- Dan

(3d Route Builder can't smooth it and BTB can't seem to smooth it either btw!)

 

[Kennett Ylitalo]

Select all nodes in any of the 2D views, use ctrl+A), right-click and select: Smooth selected control points -> all directions. Also GE is not excactly precise, you can easily get the height of the surrounding terrain instead of the road so use common sense. For ex i traced Dades Gorge with close zoom and still some points were clearly from the cliffs right next to the road (over 30m height difference between nodes, pics/videos showed almost flat.).

If the height diferences between nodes are doing the bumbs, you can select few nodes and use Smooth Selected Nodes (right-click) but note that the elevation is smoothed between the first and last nodes linearly. After that you may need to smooth the control points to make it smooth.

 

[danwilkie90]

Thanks mate, I had tried that before but maybe I hadn't actually selected the nodes last time, it's working fine now!

 

[jtbo]

Also GE roads and roads on satellite photography are not at same place, probably satellite images are ones off, but difficult to say, this makes it quite difficult to get heights in, also resolution of height data leaves something to be desired for sure, but better than nothing.

 

[Dingo-J]

I had this issue also. I haven't tried this idea yet as I "eyeballed it", but here it is anyway.

The problem is that there are so many control points it gets really difficult to make a smooth road that still resembles the actual one, once you've finished mucking with it to get something smooth and drivable. So what if you were to import the data, then place cones (NOT set "rest on ground") all around the track simply to mark where the center of the road should be. Then you could go through and delete control points and smooth out your track, and still have the cones as a reference to where everything should be?

It's not anything like scanning a track, but could work (maybe?).

Just a thought.

 

[Kennett Ylitalo]

I had this issue also. I haven't tried this idea yet as I "eyeballed it", but here it is anyway.

The problem is that there are so many control points it gets really difficult to make a smooth road that still resembles the actual one, once you've finished mucking with it to get something smooth and drivable. So what if you were to import the data, then place cones (NOT set "rest on ground") all around the track simply to mark where the center of the road should be. Then you could go through and delete control points and smooth out your track, and still have the cones as a reference to where everything should be?

It's not anything like scanning a track, but could work (maybe?).

Just a thought.

Or copy the imported track and modify the copy. Shape the original road to make it easier to separete the two roads apart and change it's material to something easily visible. Make it as "no render", no btb ground etc, tick all those boxes off so it won't show ingame. Could work better than manually placing hundreds of placeholders..