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Road Texture

First of all, you will need Photoshop (which I am using here) or a similar piece of software. Secondly, you need a simple asphalt texture. To save your time, you can use one of those which come with 3ds max (if you have it, that is). I used Asphalt3.jpg which is located in the maps/concrete folder.

Create a new file in PS and make it fairly large. Mine is 3024×3072 pixels, which is 4×6 of the asphalt texture. Fill that file with the asphalt texture (either copy and paste it, or make a new pattern). The texture already isn’t very repetitive as it doesn’t have much recognizible features on it, but if it is that can be avoided by adding a new layer over it and filling it with black and white clouds (filter>render>clouds), switching its blend mode to darken or whatever suits you and lowering its opacity. This will give you slight discolourations in the asphalt.

Now for the strips. Create a new layer and with the rectangular marquee tool mark the area where your line will be. Be sure that it isn’t too wide or too thin according to the texture (Fig. 1).

Fill this selection with yellow or white colour. Here, I’m making the yellow side strips. Now change the layer’s blending mode to difference and deselect the selection (Fig. 2).

Do the same thing for the white lines. Add a new layer, use the marquee tool on the yellow strips to get the same width but make it much shorter. Move this selection to where you want the white lines to be, fill it with white colour and copy/paste a couple times to get more lines.

Merge all of the layers you get into just one (Ctrl+E). Change this layer’s blending mode to difference or overlay to make them really weak and worn out. Now choose the eraser tool set on 100% with one of the brushes like the one I used (Fig. 3)

and delete a few random areas on the stripes. Repeat this with with other brushes with varying sizes, etc. You can also delete quite more as I did here which might look like it was made with aggressive driving and braking. Use the same brush on the asphalt texture with the burn tool to make it darker. You can add these on more areas of the road as well. Here’s another example – Fig. 4.

For more realism you could make a custom brush with tire thread for these brake marks, but since I’m lazy and this was used just for the car render I din’t.

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