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The Three Click Bunker


So we keep telling you how easy our tools will be to use, but talk is cheap! Here's a quick preview of what it takes to actually make a finished sand bunker (final versions will be more polished and better looking!)
So we keep telling you how easy our tools will be to use, but talk is cheap! Here's a quick preview of what it takes to actually make a finished sand bunker (final versions will be more polished and better looking!)

First of all you use a simplified version of Unity's Terrain sculpting tools to mould the terrain, it's like a paintbrush but you're painting hills, slopes and valleys instead. If you can use any computer paint program such as MS Paint you can use this!

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Once you're happy with your bunker elevations you can now draw the more detailed bunker outline in our shape drawing tool. Make sure 'bunker' is ticked.

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Click 'Create bunker' - This creates your detailed bunker mesh automatically.

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Click 'Finish' - This adds the textures and dirt lip automatically. Of course if you want more control you can easily change the textures and the type of bunker edge ie grass, dirt etc for a different look.

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That's it!



With lots of automation like this which takes the hard work out of building your course, you can spend more time designing it and less time building it. Share it with the Online community and have it played and rated by other players. If we like it, we'll use it for one of our real time tournaments and you'll get rewarded with special 'in game' items only available to course builders.

These tools are for you. Go on..... be creative!


33 Comments

Oooooooooh! This will be a great help to a number of designers, me included. Always found things like this fiddly in APCD, so any automation to this level of detail is a major plus IMO. Really looking forward to being able to have a play with an early build of the Perfect Golf designer. Any ideas when this will be made available?
This is incredible. This will allow people to make courses in half the time and this is just one tool. Simply amazing. I would love to see a couple of details on lips of the bunker. This is one characteristic that can make a golf course fit its terrain or style. Over the years I have especially appreciated your ability to do this is links. From Crystal Pines, to Pilgram Trails, to Burn's Old Links. If you could shed some insight that would be great!!!
Mike, first of all let me say that I was never able to grasp all the nuances of the APCD but I was able to create a couple "fairly decent" courses with the designer in Custom Play Golf 2. IF you are familiar with their designer, how would you compare the learning curve with the one that you and your people plan on creating?
Very, very impressive, even us TW2008 course designers should be able to use this software. I found the APCD way too difficult for my limited talents.
This is really looking interesting and has peaked my interest alot. Keep up the good work.
Very good to get some more insight into the design process! I like the philosophy to automate some of the design functions while retaining capability for more detailed refinement for those who would like to go deeper. You mention some simplified Unity tools for use in designing - will those be provided by PP as add-ons to the Unity engine specifically for use in the Course Forge?
Once I learned to seem blend, doing bunkers became a very long process. I usually only had 2 seams for mine, but thats a lot of path and multiple mappings and vert moving. Almost drove you insane after hours of doing it. This will be a great help and I look forward to learning the new designer. If I can be of any help, I will.
Also looking forward to my first attempt at course construction. What really got my interest was your mention of real time tournaments, sounds like a great idea. Is that something the various independent tours will be able to utilize?
Mike I can't wait to get my teeth into the designer, just looks awesome! I suppose there will be a 'simplify' option if you want to remove a bunker and take out all the verts to start over? Adriaan
Tim, I appreciate your feedback and as you know probably no-one used APCD course designer for Links more than me! As awesome as it was, too few people ever got to grips with it and that means a lot of people who wanted to be creative just gave up. With the CourseForge, we are trying to make it as simple as possible while at the same time allowing you to create extra special looking courses if you want to go the extra mile.
Hi Adriaan, yes it's easy to take out the bunker or completely change it's shape if you want. I'm looking forward to being able to show some early videos of the tools in action when we have tidied up the interface.
Hi Mike looks great. I gave up designing courses with the APCD. This looks very easy and I would like to test this new one. clint
This is going to help make course designing fun again! Hope it won't be much longer before you're able to roll this out Mike!
John Griffin
Dec 10 2012 11:27 PM
Very good to get some more insight into the design process! I like the philosophy to automate some of the design functions while retaining capability for more detailed refinement for those who would like to go deeper. You mention some simplified Unity tools for use in designing – will those be provided by PP as add-ons to the Unity engine specifically for use in the Course Forge? Is there any point in working with the Unity download prior to the release of any course-specific tools? Or will the Course Forge be provided as a separate package that includes both the Unity engine as well as course tools?
Hi Mike, I would like to see some bunkers in the Rugged Dune style or Crooked Creek style and what the advanced design can do, when you have time of course. Cheers Peter Gemmill
The Unity editor is a large multi faceted 3d package. We're only using a very small percentage of it's tools and building our own toolset to work alongside it. Looking at the entire Unity editor would be perhaps a lot to take in! If you want to go ahead an take a look by all means but only really concern yourself with the Unity terrain functions such as texture painting and the elevation tools.
The Rugged Dune style bunkers are mainly a function of textures and plantings along with some randomisation of the bunker edge. When I get time to do some experimenting with that I'll post some pics in a new blog.
Hey, that was my question too, Mikes answer convinces me that this may be a walk in the park compared to APCD. Cheers, Jim
"As awesome as it was, too few people ever got to grips with it and that means a lot of people who wanted to be creative just gave up." ----You've described me to a tee With the CourseForge, we are trying to make it as simple as possible while at the same time allowing you to create extra special looking courses if you want to go the extra mile ----I couldn't be more delighted. I designed dozens of courses on JNSE back in the day, but didn't have the CAD skills or time to succeed with the APCD or any of its predecessors (JN5, JN6, Sierra's PGA game whatever it was called), etc. Really looking forward to this one.
Everthing about your endevaour here Mike is highly anticipated! I have you linked on my site and I hope to see this game rolled out soon. Will this game include the good old "3-Click" swing type? Thanks. Lee
Droooooooooooooooooooooooooooool
Hi there, I always thought CPG was fairly easy to use to create courses but one of the things that made it much harder than it should have been was working on different layers with the height and surface layers which wasn't really a good workflow. Also because it was much harder to make a course look good because the vegetation implementation was so poor. APCD was very powerful but took a lot of learning. On the flip side it was possible to make golf courses that looked almost real with although it wasn't a true 3d environment and just a slideshow of static pictures. We're aiming to bridge that gap by making something that's pretty easy to us and intuitive but that can also create really very realistic looking courses by default. I made a course from scratch a few weeks ago and from start to finish including all the elevations and planting etc it took probably a quarter of the time an equivalent apcd course would have taken. This is also using alpha version of our tools while they are still being improved and optimized so things should be even quicker when we launch the first iteration of CourseForge to our kickstarter supporters.
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John Griffin
Dec 15 2012 01:15 AM
Those last few words should get some attention - provide Kickstarter support, get early access to the Course Forge!
Just a quick note - our course drawing tools just got a BIG upgrade. Can't wait to do a new dev blog soon and share some of the good stuff with you guys.
Very cool Mike!