Hi everyone,

I'm new to this whole environment. I'm looking for any pointers that help to develop a visualizer of civil work.

My idea is to create a 3D road of X miles long, and in that road there are restaurants, phones, lamps, car washes, etc. Anything.

My goal is to have a #D visualization of this road and be able to scroll through that road. But also have a list, or a menu, with everything that is available on that road (the restaurants, etc.) And once a select any of them, the visualization moves automatically to that location. Being able to pan rotate and zooming. But the default camera is static all the time, unless you move it.

Any pointers where can I start? I'm resourceful in Blender to make all the assets, but have no idea how to export those to an engine like Unity or Unreal to make things happen.

Thanks everyone.

Any advice is very welcome!

Sergemx73

I'd suggest to start playing with one of the engines (or both, even, so you can compare). Find some tutorials, and try them even if they don't do exactly what you want. No doubt some of them aim to display a 3d model. If you're really lucky they import a blender model.

Otherwise, search. Simply literally entering a question like “how to import a blender model into unity” in a search engine usually gives some starting points for further exploration.

Postpone trying to solve your goal for a while, understand how things work first. You're stumbling in the dark, first make some light before trying to find the path.

Once the puzzle pieces of the engine and/or Blender start to fall into place, you may want to try a more direct path towards solving your problem. At that point you can use all the knowledge you learned from experimenting.

Sergemx73 said:
Any pointers where can I start? I'm resourceful in Blender to make all the assets, but have no idea how to export those to an engine like Unity or Unreal to make things happen.

I lack experience with game engines, but afaik the standard to import assets is an fbx file. So you would export models / animations as fbx from blender. Chances engines can import a blend are quite low i guess, but it should not matter much.

Sergemx73 said:
My goal is to have a #D visualization of this road and be able to scroll through that road. But also have a list, or a menu, with everything that is available on that road (the restaurants, etc.) And once a select any of them, the visualization moves automatically to that location. Being able to pan rotate and zooming. But the default camera is static all the time, unless you move it.

I think you would not create the street network in blender, but in the game engine.
They should already have related tools i assume, and using those instead blender should help with things like pathfinding, physics, efficiency, and the camera system as well.

Technically, the street network should be implemented as a graph data structure. Crossings are it's vertices, and street segments are the edges connecting them.
A street network is likely drawn from splines, which also gives you a parameterization to define a position on the street, which the camera system can use to drive towards. The same thing can be used to model some procedural traffic, etc.

So maybe, a next step for you could be to try game engines, looking for their built in tools to create streets, and also eventually looking for better tools / extensions on related asset stores.

You would use blender to model buildings, cars and characters, but you would use the game engines editor to create the world, decorated with those models. Ofc. that's primarily about content creation, ignoring things like programming to make a game.

That just said to give you some general idea of how it's usually done, adding to the advise from the post above. But since your question is very broad at this point, that's probably all we can do for now.
(There are likely good ways to design the street network in blender as well. I just assume it's more difficult and less ideal.)

If the 3D highway visualization is simple (a straight road, no elevation changes), you could achieve a solution relatively simply by scrolling the road texture's co-ordinates and keeping the camera stationary. You wouldn't need to “model” a road that has increasingly large vertex positions depending on how long your highway visualization needs to be.

As for rendering the 3D objects, buildings, trees, etc, you could give a world position for each object, and then simply subtract from the road's “view position” when rendering, thus still keeping the 3D world camera stationary. The point of doing it this way is you can keep adding objects to your heart's content and just render objects within a range of the road's position for culling purposes. You could make your road thousands of miles long without needing to alter it in any way. You just define as many objects as you'd like and simply give a single 3D world position for them.

I might make a demonstration later.

Hi, I've prototyped what I described earlier. You can view the project here:

https://github.com/srjreid/HighwayRoad​

This is a good starting point to achieve your goal. It works by scrolling the texture co-ordinates of the road and grass textures. You can move forward and backward on the road, and the objects can be placed along the road's length.​

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@JoeJ Thanks for all these points!! Really interesting. Appreciate your time to respond. I'll into some of the structures you mentioned and start digging. Thanks a lot!

@SeanReid Thanks Sean! Appreciate the feedback! Actually I want the road to be shown in 3D, so yes, I would like to model it in blender, with curves, slopes, etc. Maybe bridges. Not sure yet. But it's more for marketing visualization than game. Offering a view on how to develop further new highways and the look of them. Is a little ambitious I have to say, but construction companies may appreciate the previews, ideas, investors, etc. But the idea fo the static camera is something that I didn't knew. So, i'll look into that, either in Unity or UR Engine. Thanks a lot

@Alberth Thanks Alberth! Yeap most definately I'll play with both engines. The thing is to learn both at the same time. Apparently URE is more used nowadays, so I'll give it a try. So many ideas already, but I think I'm understanding a little bit more how this should suppose to work. Thanks a lot!