2551 replies to this topic

[Jimbobh]

Be Thankful, You have a LOT more than the rest of us.

[Ted_Ball]

 

 

Even I, who likes all things grungy, sometimes wonder if this is a bit much regarding spots and blemishes and irregularities. 

 

They are essential K11.  Continue using your instinct.

 

"The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful.

What the beautiful is   is another question."

[Kablammo11]

Well, well.. t'is Ted from Oz! Nice reading from you again.

 

It's not just the spots and blemishes that add to the grunge factor, I reckon, but also the unevenness of the playing surface: The bumps and hollows. I do dislike flat and smooth fairways of the American-style school, ribbons of short stuff layed out like motorways. I wanted Willow Heath to be lots bumpier, but, truth told, I chickened out and flattened the more controversial bits. The Black Swan being an Irish links course in the tradition of Lahinch Old and New, Ballybunion Old & New, Ennistymon etc (I played all these courses, baby, I was there, I know how they are!), this new venture offers me a great opportunity to overcompensate for my past sins.

Below, a sequence of 5 images tells the story of how I bumped the triple-fairway of holes 3/16/18 into the opposite of a billiard table: with a terrain brush liberally applied and cautiously smoothed back into a lunar landscape, then rendering the meshes on top.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This all is creating a nice synergy: The splashes and blotches on the fairway texture help tell the visual story of the bumps on the terrain.

[RobC]

ok Me again ...So when you create the texture is it just a plain colour looking like grass then the shader puts the grungy colour in. Does the dirt and grunginess(?) then get put in by you so its random...sorry not very good at explaining what I mean.

When we made textures in TW the 'other' colours had to be put in at source so it was dificult to not get tiling:-

this would be the 1024*1024 tile

And this is how it would be in game

As you can see it tiles but mostly that was noticed from distance... you could lose some of it using Mip Maps but it was still noticable...

So what I think I am trying to say is how do you cover the tiling effect is it the shader?

sorry to hi-jack your thread...course looks great by the way

Cheers RobC

[Kablammo11]

Rob, before I can answer your question, there's a bit of explanation to read through. In CF, you get to use 2 different tiles of different sizes to create one surface. 

 

The first one is a simple green grassy tile for fairway coloration, 512 in size, like so:

 

 

This tile is currently 16 meter high and wide - quite large. That helps with preventing tiling, because the terrain usually slopes away and turns and this hides the tiling on ground levels. This element brings the colors and the dirty bits into the mix. It gets combined with this second element, a shader:

 

This one is 1024 in size and provides the structure of the fairway grass. It is currently tiled (seamlessly) at 1.2 meters dimension, much smaller, much more densly packed than the ground file above. Being a grayscale file helps with the tiling - no awkward color shift. Also, having a uniformly noisy structure, tiling is much easier.

Imagine now, Rob, that these two files are combined into one surface. If you know the "Multiply" blending mode in Photoshop, the shader is projected on top of the ground texture the same way: The black and darker bits of the shader remain visible, all its lighter and white bits become transparent, revealing the texture below.

 

And this is where the magic happens. The Layers Library in CourseForge. You get to set dimensions etc, and eventually will learn how to operate this handy, neat and quite frustrating little thing:

 

 

So, having two superimposed textures tiled at different dimensions helps a great deal in reducing the dreaded tiles. What's more, this makes the surface look good at all distances. Nearby, the grass shader shows you the single blades of the fairway you are standing on. And in the middle and long distance, the ground texture takes over and adds the colors and the feel of a fairway.

 

Note that in the background you can see tree different types of fairway. I have a base fairway, a dry fairway (bottom right of shot) and a muddy fairway (top left). I add the latter two as child meshes inside the base fairway to provide yet more visual variety - and break up the tile patterns inside the base fairway (It's a bit of a K11 exclusive, regular PP courses don't do that).

 

Tiling, no matter how hard you try, is practically unavoidable. In certain follow cam views in the game I can easily spot the single tiles that even a master of the craft like Mike Jones could not eradicate. To avoid tiling, Unity lets you blend several textures over each other. On fairways and golfing surfaces, the best way to go is to add a lot of uneven breaks and to never, never, never, never allow a single surface mesh to stretch out and expand away without adding some child textures.

[RobC]

Thanks great explanation I get it now...should be able to create some cool grass effects in the future

Cheers

[Kablammo11]

It's starting to look a little bit like a links course...

 

[RobC]

Loving the terrain work and textures....Apart from the green texture...Looks a little out of place and too manicured compared to the rest of the course but thats just my humble opinion

Cheers RobC

[mcthommo]

Please do not take this comment as any form of criticism or flaming or whatever but as much as the layout is looking very very good, I must agree with Rob that the rough textures, lovely though they are, look a bit too green for a links course.

Most links courses that I have played- which is getting close to a hundred or so, have a more yellowy brown hue to them generally due to the grass being a mixture of coarse coastal grasses

The only time that a links course has a mainly green appearance is when it has been manicured to look that way with lots of watering and fertilisers etc.

I would say K11 (come on, change it to KB you know you want to! ) this is looking more like a Clifftop course a la Pebble, Spyglass etc rather than a battered old links like Ballybunion, Royal County Down or those Irish pretenders

 

However, the work is seriously top notch and me loves ya baby

[Kablammo11]

Thanks both. To answer you both collectively, one of the greatest advantages of using CF and Unity is that it takes me not more than a couple of minutes to change the colorisation of my course, without having to redo and groundwork!

I agree about the greens, but right now they are useful to me the way they are: Every stripe you see measures 1 meter in width - and this helps me a lot the estimate dimensions - I even toyed with the idea of using striped textures for everything while building the course (which is my current focus) and then switching the proper good textures in after that. 

McT, I can tell you that along the Irish West Coast, with all the wet and heavy weather coming in from the Atlantic, the dry look is quite rare - it's rather lush and deeply dark...

 

 

...and, gonna drop a F-bomb here, so fucking beautiful!

Of course, these guys over there do have pot bunkers!

 (please imagine deep thudding noise of me dropping a heavy hint here!)

 

Anyway, as the image above shows, colorisation needs to balance ground textures and grass billboards. And objects like basalt rocks. I had to change and/or subtly adjust the colours in Willow Heath many, many times because whenever I introduced a new element all the others somehow fell out of place. So, this time around, I'm first going to build everything, then plant everything, then - and only then - going about harmonising colours and textures.

A project like this is a perpetual work in progress. You don't start at A, end at Z and you're done. It's an iterative process, where you frequently retrace your steps, question previous decisions, wander around the plot aimlessly to spot any weirdnesses, keep changing and adapting. What you are seeing here are the first steps of a long journey. But here I go babbling again...

Bottom line: No offence at all taken about your comments, they are legitimate (and politely worded at that) and they will be taken into account or ignored by me when the time is right, which is a bit further down the line. To stay in my good graces, kindly do not spell out subtexts of your messages through emoticons.

[mcthommo]

just seen I am now a "member"- quite apt in some ways I think!

[Dazmaniac]

So reading between the lines of K11's post above, I think he his subtly hinting at

 

 

 

Could be wrong though.

 

[Kablammo11]

I was actually hinting at this...

 

 

too subtle?

[Kablammo11]

Playing towards the Black Swan. View from the landing area of the 4th fairway over to the 4/15th double green:

 

 

At this stage I only deal with terrain contours and playing surfaces. Off-course textures, grasses and rocks to be added later. I changed the fog color from light blue to light yellow to give a bit of a dryer look.

And here's the double fairway for the 5th and 15th holes. Landing areas on either side of the central bunker island.

 

[Kablammo11]

A video, this time. Just me doing a bit of work with CF and Unity. The speed is doubled to cut short possible longeurs - some of which due to me operating the terrain tools outside of frame. If you spot my cursor leaving the frame to the right that means I'm operating buttons that are invisible to you.

I recommend HD settings.

 

[Brucey Mc]

Very enjoyable video K11, whetting ones appetite

[RobC]

Excellent video...very interesting

Cheers RobC

[Kablammo11]

Thanks - I disabled the full screen and the vimeo buttons, I just noticed. Now you can watch it in a better resolution.

[hyperrodik]

niiiiice I love it

[IanD]

Nice one K11... that will aid quite a few who will be starting out sometime soon..