115 replies to this topic

[zmax - sim]

To me, rough in 1.0 looks better than rough in 1.1.  Maybe its denser?  The fade with the few spikey grass is what people didn't like in 1.0.  Scioto 3DG does look very good.

[DPRoberts]

Scioto was completed differently. It's 3 textures with a denser planting. But, it's all about how it's splined, it only has 1 water plane, and no billboard grass.

Orchard Valley could be optimized and improved. I wasn't going to take over someone else's course and put a DPR stamp on it. I was trying to add grass and keep the integrity of the project.

Once again, if it's only getting 60 FPS pre grass, it's probably going to drop to 30s.

When I run 1 texture grass (I'm running simple), it drops into the 20s.

I have 1 further optimization thought that I'll try and see what happens.

[badeddiekit]

I am in the opinion that you should release what you have learned to the masses now. Much will be gained from the collective all learning in trial and error, as we have up to this point.

[DPRoberts]

Haha...I totally agree. Find me 6-8 hours to put the videos together and we're good to go.

I did learn something yesterday as well that was vital to releasing to the masses. I would've led us a bit off the cliff and people would've been angry at the FPS hit.

I'm willing to return for 100 redos of a course. Most are not. I would like to be clear on a good way to get good FPS with it.

You guys unfortunately have to deal with my stream of consciousness here but I do that to encourage learning with me.

I could've just posted it and kept quiet. I have a few videos already. So, I'm getting there...

[axe360]

OK EVERYONE. Leave Matt alone for 12 hours. There, that should be good.

[Buck]

OK EVERYONE. Leave Matt alone for 12 hours. There, that should be good.

Start the clock....

[DPRoberts]

Videos are completed. Tomorrow, I will upload, organize and post a 3DG tutorial thread. In addition to the videos, I will post some grass textures you can use and RGBA maps.

After posting, PG1 will never be the same...

[M Rose]

How long do you think it would take to add to an otherwise finished course?

[DPRoberts]

How long do you think it would take to add to an otherwise finished course?

It all depends on your splines and cart paths. A correctly splined course will just need a recalculation for grid fill and blend changes. Then, exporting meshes.

Orchard Valley in the tutorial ends up being 7 meshes.

With no talking and just work, I could do it in under 30 minutes.

However, I'm guessing your paths aren't splined?

[RBarley]

I don't want to change the subject, but just a quick question. Can you use traditional CF splines in Unity and export to blender for modification and reimport? Just a thought for not using Easy Roads.

[DPRoberts]

I don't want to change the subject, but just a quick question. Can you use traditional CF splines in Unity and export to blender for modification and reimport? Just a thought for not using Easy Roads.

Any spline in Unity, whether made by CF or made by Easy Roads or by some other third party asset, can be exported into a 3d program, modified and re-imported.

DrRob has taken it to the extreme in his courses and I believe RobC did so for Spanish Bay.

[jspirate]

Orchard Valley in the tutorial ends up being 7 meshes.

 

Hmmm, I am really confused now.  OV must have been made with the overlay technique?  I honestly don't recall even though I played the back 9.

 

I am thinking that if you put grass on a traditionally splined course, you could have 36 splines (rough and semi-rough for 18 holes).  Thats a fair bit more than 30 mins...

 

I am also thinking that maybe I should wait for the videos before I open mouth and insert foot!  Opps...

[M Rose]

Paths are easy roads.

There are splines around most elements but not everywhere. I assume it has to be on a splined area to work properly?

[DPRoberts]

Paths are easy roads.

There are splines around most elements but not everywhere. I assume it has to be on a splined area to work properly?

It can be painted on the terrain. I have not experimented with that though. The problem for that is it actually runs on a duplicate of the terrain mesh. It's then dependent on your resolution of the terrain and pixel error. People in the shader forum don't seem to get great results with it and he recommends not using Unity terrain system.

I'm guessing someone will experiment with that but then you'll have CF grass meshes next to terrain grass meshes and I think it'll struggle but who knows? (Seems like a job for DrRob...)

I think, at the moment, it seems to make sense to have surrounding outer meshes

[DPRoberts]

BUT, you can make a spline and delete it! So you could make an outer spline to get the mesh for grass planting and later delete it if you want your terrain painting to show at a distance.

You'd have to lower that mesh 0.3 instead of 0.15, I believe to have it plant grass correctly on the terrain if you follow the tutorial.

[DPRoberts]

Clickbait! Trying out some short grass...

[DPRoberts]

[Buck]

Looks really good DP!

[Skunky]

very good stuff,will you post your settings to achive this,DP.?

[DPRoberts]

I currently have it on a mesh that I added subdivisions to in Blender.

I'll see if I can get the same results with CF increasing the grid fill. Problem with smaller blades is the mesh needs to have enough vertices to plant more blades.

I've also shortened up the length the blades appear (fade end) to like 10m and upped the normals to create grittiness at 10m that "looks" like grass.

I want to try and do this with longer grass as well. In that last image, the stubble is less apparent.

Detail mesh for the BW in CF is a nice grass texture from SketchUp Texture club that tiling at 2m doesn't show a noticeable pattern like some of the others do from above view.

But, yes, I will definitely post and will put that texture up as well.