Creating Cobble Paths for JodelTown | Weekly Update #39

One thing that has bugged me for a while now are the paths in my game.
Currently, they are just painted on dirt paths to indicate where to go and also to lay down splines to encourage my AI to follow them – and honestly looking at them makes me sad.

If you are curious on how I handle NPCs following my roads and paths – there is a little post and a video about that here.

Anyways, I spent some time looking into making proper cobblestone paths, and what better excuse to learn about Geometry Nodes in Blender! It’s a win-win 😄.

(I am fully aware that I could just fake the stone with a clever material instead, but where is the fun and learning opportunity in that 😉)

If you wonder, why cobblestone? Because in Austria it’s quite literally everywhere in one form or another – or all of them at the same time 😄.

To get started, I watched this tutorial:

My early results look like this. I still want to add more distress and mossy bits to the stones to make them feel a bit more natural.

However, since I have to recreate the material in UE5 and/or bake the textures for all models I want to export, I pushed that down the line and got a basic path working first and figured out what modular bits I even have to create.

The next bit was actually figuring out what modular path bits I will need to cover most use cases in the game. And I did this very simple and a bit brutforcey.

I started off with two different lengths of straight paths (with and without end borders) and a 90-degree corner piece. Then I went to the game environment in UE and laid it over some of the dirt paths I had previously created. If I hit a kind of path I needed a new bit for (e.g., a T-crossing), I went back to Blender and just made it.

I also noticed the pieces looking a bit too perfect, so I created some path bits with a little wobble in them for some path spiciness. 😁

Some of the modular pieces I ended up with.

Honestly, the whole process was really fun, and you get to be a bit creative and at least feel a bit smart when you create pieces that fit neatly into each other.

Now I choose to lay out my paths by hand in Unreal, simply because there aren’t that many and I don’t mind it.
However, you could definitely either utilize splines or UE5’s procedural creation tools for that job, which makes sense for bigger or multiple cities so you don’t age out of existence while placing all those paths 👵😄.

Let’s have a look at those cobble stone paths – still devoid of any material for now.