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I'm currently modeling a scene that features a highway overpass at night with light streaks.

I have constructed the main piece of the overpass, and made it follow along a bezier curve with little to no problem with an array and curve modifier.

The only problem, is after I render, I get some strange shadows on the road that do not make much sense as to what the reason is. As you can see in the center by the center line

I thought at first it was the road lines causing a problem (they are on a separate mesh for ease of use), but even after rendering without them, the shadows still appear on the road.

I've tried recalculating normals and other fixes, but it hasn't worked. It might be the mesh, but I tried to keep it as low poly as possible.

Here is a top view of the road mesh if it helps

I'm not entirely sure what is causing the problem, so any help would be great.

Thanks in advance.

EDIT

Here's the modifiers on the highway enter image description here

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  • $\begingroup$ Are you using a seamless texture? or textures at all? $\endgroup$ – Knuckles209cp Jan 8 '15 at 23:43
  • $\begingroup$ Are you using Cycles or BI? $\endgroup$ – gandalf3♦ Jan 8 '15 at 23:43
  • $\begingroup$ No textures, just flat color, and I'm using blender's internal renderer. $\endgroup$ – Axi0m Jan 9 '15 at 0:11
  • $\begingroup$ If you know you are done with the curve , merge the vertices and remove doubles. $\endgroup$ – Knuckles209cp Jan 9 '15 at 1:28
  • $\begingroup$ That didnt really do anything. Even after recalculating normals. $\endgroup$ – Axi0m Jan 9 '15 at 2:12
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Delete the faces on the beginning and the end (left and right seen from image 2) of the parts. It needs to be open at the ends for the parts to merge. Play with the merge distance, make it larger until it snaps. I can see from image 2 that the parts did not merge causing shadows in between. You need an equal amount of vertices on begin and end to make it snap.

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  • $\begingroup$ good call, I over-looked that. Those in between faces will certainly cause a mess, which brings up a good point. When you have visual errors; it's a good idea to start hiding faces around the affected area so you can see if there's anything going on underneath. $\endgroup$ – MarcClintDion Jan 9 '15 at 13:00
  • $\begingroup$ Thanks guys, I had the same realization as well a bit ago. Since the BI renderer was causing me problems though, I switched over to cycles, and things are working perfectly, if not better. The noise is a bit much, but I can be patient when it comes to the final render. Thanks a lot guys! $\endgroup$ – Axi0m Jan 9 '15 at 20:53

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