Quick Start: Create a Road

This is part 1 of the Quick Start. You will build your first road end to end — draw it, give it lanes, preview it, and bake it into a mesh — touching all three pillars of the workflow: Create → Edit → Bake (see The MetaRoad Workflow).

Quick Start series: 1. Create a Road (you are here) → 2. Build a T-Junction Manually → 3. Build a T-Junction with the Intersection Tool

Note

Prerequisite: the MetaRoad plugin is installed and enabled — see Installation. A landscape or any surface to draw on is helpful but not required.

1. Enter the Meta Road editor mode

In the level editor, open the editor mode dropdown (top-left toolbar) and choose Meta Road. The mode panel appears with its tile palette; the Create category is selected by default. See The Meta Road Editor Mode.

2. Draw a road (Create)

In the Create palette, click the Spline tile to activate the Draw Spline tool. Click in the viewport to place road points; each click adds a point and the road preview follows. Press Enter/Accept to finish. A new AMetaRoad actor containing your road spline is created. Full details: Draw Spline Tool.

3. Add lanes (Edit)

With the road selected, open the Edit palette and click the Section tile. Use the viewport handles and the context menu to add lanes and lane sections, and the Selection panel to tune lane properties. See Section Mode. You can also adjust the reference-line shape in Spline Mode, the center-line offset in Offset Mode, and per-lane width in Width Mode.

4. Preview the result

At the top of the panel, switch the view toggle from Schematic to Preview. You now see a live, non-destructive preview of the generated road mesh that updates as you keep editing — nothing has been written to disk yet.

5. Bake the mesh

Open the Bake palette and click the Bake tile, then Bake Selected (or Bake All). Baking runs in the background with a progress notification; when it finishes, a generated actor named <YourActor>_Gen appears in the level, holding the baked static/spline meshes. Full details: Baking.

Tip

Grouping tip. Each road actor bakes as its own mesh. If you later join roads at a junction, keep their splines in the same actor and the same SubGroup so they fuse into one seamless mesh — see Spline grouping.

Next steps