invisible lofts

Anyone able to explain how you go about building an invisible loft in 3DC. I need one for my roads, so I can add cars etc.

A working example would be great if you have it.

Hi,

A late reply, but maybe still helpful to you or somebody else:

This can be done quite quickly, simply drag a cube onto your scene, delete the for- and reaward facing faces. Texture it with a fully transparent dummy texture, apply the shader LoftTexDiffTrans.fx, set Transparency and export as a loft.

You’re done!

This trick is also very helpful if you need something to create placement guides for often used objects, like street lights, hedges, or even bridges. Just enter which ever object you want as "middle geometry" to the invisible loft’s BIN and you get a nice, and easily terrain-adjustable string of objects.

Another cool effect is that all of the "middle geometry" objects will get twisted by the game engine when you put the loft on a slope. So, for exmaple, if you have telegraph poles with attached wires, the wires will follow the slope gradient of the loft section and align with the next telegraph pole. See the screenshot below for an example of that effect.

[img:1s301fyi]http://i197.photobucket.com/albums/aa76/GreatNortherner/RS/20101103-gantry2.jpg[/img:1s301fyi]

The actual model in the picture above consists of one gantry pole with one pair of wires attached, and the wires are 100% horizontal in the shape. On level terrain it would look like this:

[img:1s301fyi]http://i197.photobucket.com/albums/aa76/GreatNortherner/RS/20101104-gantry1.jpg[/img:1s301fyi]

Cheers,
Michael