zigzag challenge (blue guys?)

[Dune]

Related to the Roman road, I am looking for a way to bend a (soft) line at specific areas, thus forming a zigzagging line, with kind of soft corners. Implementing curves would be the ultimate, but for now I am hoping for another solution. Yesterday I spent a short time on trying to bend a simple shape by warp, redirect, vector displacement and a distance shader, but couldn't get it to work. But probably didn't do my best 
Using the painted shader is not really an option, as it is hard to draw a straight line (unless something like in Photoshop can be implemented; hold shift and click elsewhere). External mask is, but more cumbersome.
So, any ideas or solutions would be terrific. New challenge guys!

[AP]

I have all sorts of functions but no Zigzags. I am trying some warps and the like but so far this alludes me.

[Dune]

I need not any zigzag, but manually shaped, to make it more complicated 

[AP]

Well, you said Zigzagging lines so i assumed a Zigzag. I must have misread something at some point. All i can think of is using a soft circle to distort a road using some warper shader. Perhaps i have no idea what i am talking about though.

[Dune]

zigzaaaaag, or ziiiiigzagziiigzaaaaaaag, etc 

Here's what I got so far; you can make a line bend (not easy, but I found three methods), but it works only as a child, not as mask, and the reason eludes me. And I can't get any displacement to convert to scalar either.  I certainly hope a simple solution is possible, or else I'll deposit a feature request. It would be very handy to manually add locations where a line should bend or go to next.

[AP]

What shader are you using for area for bend? If it is a Simple Shape shader, would not softening it a bit smooth the sharp corners of the road?

[Hetzen]

Is this for your roman road following your river?

Can you show a reference pic? I'm not sure what you are asking for.

[Dune]

Hey Jon, good to see you here. Yes, but I'm not certain yet (some emails have been sent) if these border roads were indeed straight in parts or curving along with the river. It's mainly that I want to find a way to make sharper angles in a road, if necessary.

EDIT: I just found a way to influence the warping by adding a SSS, but it's not perfect, as it narrows the (SSS) line.

[j meyer]

Since you are using many nodes anyway, why not combining SSS straights instead
of warping them to get the angles? You could have sharp angles that way and a
constant width.

[bobbystahr]

Good call Jochen, was about to suggest just that.

[Hetzen]

Have to agree with Jochen and Bobby. You could probably try and warp the SSS with an off center function. But it will be painful to work out and quite honestly take a long time to figure out.

I'd paint in/out the sharp edges of multiple SSSs.

From that image you posted, I'd have thought the Romans would have built a straight road straight through the marsh land rather than followed the river edge. It's what they're famous for, unheard of for the time civil/military engineering projects.

Also, didn't they cobble and camber these roads with drainage ditches either side?

[Hetzen]

It's a cracking image/project btw.

[Hetzen]

Just made a cobble pattern that might be useful...

http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,21128.msg211449.html#msg211449

[AP]

Terragen needs a procedural B-Spline drawing tool for making Roads and Rivers.

[Hetzen]

Terragen needs a procedural B-Spline drawing tool for making Roads and Rivers.

Would be useful that, something that gives me x,z outputs would be extra useful, ie spline space coordinates.

Problem with that is, 90 degree tangents off the spline to give a fake x on a z spline will cause overlapping. There could be clever ways of dealing with it by sampling several z tangents though. Hrmm.