37 replies to this topic

[slewin]

Hello Guys,

This will be the thread for progress on this project. I have a great lidar scanned terrain which will be great once I have my hands on CF(Hint Hint)...I have started on the Clubhouse which is a great golden age building and will certainly be a challenge to capture.

Below is what I have in unity currently with many weeks to go before I complete the clubhouse. Im mostly excited to see how these amazing green complexes play out in game as I have never seen the course first hand. It will be tough no question.

 

Any thoughts?

Scott Lewin

[Keith]

Sensational start..wow.  Great golf course you are working on.

[Lukas]

Good work slewin.

It's good to see someone is getting started on real life projects - for me these are the most exciting.

[M Rose]

One of thing that most excites me is the tools coming that will make real courses much less of a chore than previous platforms of choice.

 

Obviously real courses are what most players get excited about, so I'm going to try my best to learn these tools well enough to share some real courses when I get the chance. I already have about five or six I want to try.

[slewin]

Having the real world data is a major break through and obviously cuts down the work load considerable. I'm amazed by Tillinghasts greens on the West as these things are hard to see on TV.

[slouis]

That looks great!  The courses currently available do not have much in the way of buildings.  If there is one, it sits by the 18th green.  I think more structures such as houses and buildings on a course would add greatly to the realistic look of a course.  The question is,  would the addition of these structures negatively impact FPS?

[Kablammo11]

  The question is,  would the addition of these structures negatively impact FPS?

 

Not likely. A building has only a fraction of the polygons that every single tree has. You can build a primitive (generic) house out of only 10 verts and 6 polygons, a tree has 1000's of each. A slightly more detailed building can have 100's of them and still be no problem.

Then again, trees in the background can be switched to billboards, whereas buildings can't. But as long as the windows in the buildings do not reflect the course (which would very severely affect performance), their impact on FPS is negligible - and even beneficial overall, if every building replaces a couple of trees.

The reason because so few buildings were added until now is because there are no really useful 3D models of them around. There are 10's of thousands that can be bought online, but simple and good-looking ones (to which PP owns the rights of distribution), probably are very rare. And then, for real golf courses, there also may be franchising and copyrighting aspects to consider.

[frank70]

That means galleries would be okay for fps as well? I would love to have some courses with galleries.

[Kablammo11]

Well, if by gallery you mean 2D cutouts of bystanders, yes. But these really would come across as a bit old-fashioned and lifeless, I suppose. It's all a question of vertices and polygons (trigons or tris in Unity, since Unity converts all surfaces to triangular shapes). You have a total budget of roughly 3 mio tris at your disposal. How and on what you decide to spend it is up to you.

[slewin]

The American Classic:
18th on the West
Play testing has confirmed that this course will be a beast!!

[slewin]

3 hours to layout 9 holes and screw around with the overlay. 
Gotta love that.
Goodbye APCD may you rest in peace.

[Griz891]

Would love to get my hands on this course forge. Use to love designing and that looks awesome by the way!!

[DoGgs]

i'm hearing the acronym lidar a lot here...i'm clueless, what is it? can i use it? how difficult is it? looks great btw

[Dazmaniac]

D,

 

Acronym for Light Detection And Ranging.

 

It's a form of laser scanning. a lot of driving/racing games use this technology to laser scan race tracks so that they are as realistic as they can get in game. iRacing have all their tracks laser scanned down to a few mm's for added realism. So you get all the elevation and layout data from the LiDaR scan and then incorporate that in your game and then add the textures etc.

 

This is iRacing's Montreal GP Circuit (Gilles Villeneuve) laser scan 

 

Which they then turn in to

 

So imagine how accurate golf course data could be. I believe it can come at a price though.

[slewin]

using CF without having to touch the terrain is simply amazing as every nuance is there particularly on the greens. Unfortunately there is a limited area in the U.S. that has been scanned.

[M Rose]

I've had my hands on CF for about 24 hours now. I'm astounded. All of the most undesirable tasks in APCD have basically been simplified or eliminated completely. Once everyone gets the hang of this, you are going to see high quality stuff come out in weeks, not months.

 

So far, it is everything I hoped it would be, which is a logical extension of APCD, streamlined into a really intuitive and quick-learning package. The Unity side of things is the harder part.

[slewin]

Slowly but surely I am starting to see the course come to life.

 

 

 

 

 

[Volker]

Pics are looking great, Slewin. I would like to play the course some day...

[Keith]

Looking very much like the real deal.  Great stuff!

[M Rose]

That's amazing. The bar is already very, very high.