9 replies to this topic

[oZZeus]

I've spent a bit of time trying out the Unity terrain editor. To be fair, it takes a bit of time and effort to master - and I haven't come anywhere remotely near mastering it!!

It's spending this time with the OOB - not Out Of Bounds - but Out Of the Box - tools and adding a few textures to come up with this image of 1 green and a practice fairway/chipping area ... Capture 3 (note, no planting of trees and grasses in this view - yet).

It's by doing this test project and comparing it against the videos of CF in action, that we can gain a true appreciation of what CF will do for course designers. In particular, I see the benefits of creating the splines for each mesh/texture, the automatic and customisable blending between textures (e.g. dirt lip in bunkers), automatic green fringe, and many more...

Hopefully, at some point the Terrain Converter will be able to convert Civil3d surfaces into heightmaps ready to import into Unity/CF.

BTW, looking at the price of some of the Unity tools on the Assets Store - if CF sells for anything under $125, it will be ... insert appropriate word here!! Some simple tools are selling for between $40 and $125!! And, CF promises so much more on so many different levels than many of these other tools.

Anyway, that's my 2 cents...

Can't wait.

Cheers

Scott

 

 

 

 

Attached Files

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[Kablammo11]

I concur with your assessment. The Standard Water package in Unity is minimal - as your picture demonstrates - for something more you need Water Pro for 70 bucks.

Ka-Ching!

 

Then again, Unity needs to make money somehow - and the asset store goodies have been developped by indies and amateurs who deserve a reward for their efforts. Also, it's not like most of them are going to sell thousands of units of their products, just a few dozen at best, so pricing will be steep. Nothing stops you from learning how to code scripts, creating assets and selling them through Unity. But before any of us can go on a shopping spree (or refuse to do so), we first would need to know where Unity ends and the CourseForge begins. As long as we have not tried out all the CF features, we don't know yet what we don't know.

I daresay that I will complete at least my first project by only utilizing the available freeware and the templates provided by the Forge. Only then I will be able to see if something more is needed. In the meantime, designing stuff like waterfalls and whitewater rivers - and effortlessly with just a few mouse clicks at that - is definitely not on for the moment. And might never be without some extra investments.

 

Regarding textures and golf-related objects, I'm willing to share my stuff with other CF designers, btw. Perhaps we could install some sort of a course design asset trade point right here. There's no point to have 50 guys fiddling around with seamless textures for mud each on his own, when there could be a texture library from where to pick the one that you need. 

[oZZeus]

Golf Course Design Asset Trade Point . What a great idea!!... let's get it underway NOW!!!   There's so many talented people in this community. Us "old dogs" may need to learn some new tricks to work with Blender, Maya, 3DMax, etc.... but we can create a bank of textures, 3D models, scripts, signage, any golf-specific items...

Great idea... K11 ... Ka Boom!!!

[Kablammo11]

Glad you like the idea. But it's easy to talk the talk, we need to walk the walk as well. So I'm going first.

Here's a screen cap of a work in progress (Actually, it's more of a study in landscaping... and gosh, that basic water looks...not nice... no reflections until you fork out moolah for the Water Pro package...)

 

And here, here and here are the 3 textures I used to get the cliffy groove.

 

I recommend setting them to 512 dimension and to tile them no larger than 10 by 10 Unity units. And to paint all three of them over each other until you get something slightly natural. Steep terrain slopes are tricky to texturize, since Unity Terrains are flat planes that get distorted vertically, while the texture tiles are applied from the top down, not following the curve and elevation of the terrain - so if you want to make vertical cliffs, you would have to construct and import a mesh object... So much to consider, so much to learn. Right now I'm trying to find out if it's possible to add  bump maps to terrain textures...  baby steps... Oh, I seem to have gone on a bit of a rant, here. Sorry. Well, this is not a lot at all, but at least it's a start...

[HalkeFralg]

I think you are on to something. If the designers pool their resources, the result can only be better for PG. By release, we should have have a vast course library that makes the game appealing, but also the resources necessary to expand that library. Great thinking!

-Another point, I think by taking this approach, it frees the devs up to focus on the gameplay and the game itself. Let the community develop the course content and assets. 

[John Griffin]

Glad you like the idea. But it's easy to talk the talk, we need to walk the walk as well. So I'm going first.

Here's a screen cap of a work in progress (Actually, it's more of a study in landscaping... and gosh, that basic water looks...not nice... no reflections until you fork out moolah for the Water Pro package...)

 

That looks pretty good so far, thanks for sharing the textures and technique tips.  I'm envious - I've installed Unity but haven't had any time to play with it yet!  Good to see folks starting to exercise it and see what it can do.

[Kablammo11]

Thanks, John Griffin. It looks okay from far away. Once you move closer the illusion quickly dissolves.

There are rocks and cliffs packages available in the asset store and they do look much better. But they cost money - and even if I were to buy them, my skill level is not advanced enough to know how to even use them. If total mastery is 100%, I'm still in the very low single digits right now.

[Mike Jones]

Nice start!

 

Regarding the heightmap you're using and the ridges as you see - this is usually because the heightmap isn't being saved out from it's source as a 16 bit file and hence you get a lot less shades of grey for the Unity to work with.

 

Check your export options from your 3rd party program and also running the raw file through photoshop and doing some blur's on the greyscale will help with the acute ridges.

[Kablammo11]

Thanks Mike.

Those ridges and edges, believe it or not, are actually left there on purpose. They help me to get a better feel for elevations - they serve the same purpose as the altitude lines on a paper map. I could of course blur the beejeezus out of my Photoshop heightmap, but that would not reduce the need to manually fine-tune the result anyway. Since I do fantasy courses, I need to grow my terrain patiently and dream up the finer undulations in the 3D view of Unity. I find it impossible to figure out and then create a grayscale heightmap that is already containing all the finished details. So I might as well leave my heightmap all scratchy and edgy for now, like a rough draft, and go over it with the big bad 100% Smoothing Hammer a bit later. Takes just seconds...

 

And I am using a 4096 16bit Photoshop Raw heightmap. 

 

My biggest problem is of course to know if I can landscape and texturize away to the edge of the rough areas of the course already, or if I'm in danger of getting into CourseForge territory without knowing it and creating later problems I'm not aware of yet - like collisions settings for my textures. I don't know yet if you will offer a rock or cliff function wherein we can add bump maps to the texture tiles, or a few dozen templates for rocks and stones... There will be, though, a lighthouse on top of yon cliff eventually. That's about the only certainty I currently have.

[Mike Jones]

It'll take a long time to smooth those humps out in Unity with a 4096 file so be warned about making your first draft both high res but low detail, they don't play nicely together.

 

CourseForge is mainly concerned with what's happening on the golf course itself ie the playing areas, the stuff that's 'Off Piste' will be pretty much Unity for the time being. We may develop more tools as the need arises though.