2551 replies to this topic

[Kablammo11]

M-Appeal   Hmmmm...??? No!

 

Anyway, I did post my to-do list earlier, not getting any love from any of you about how thoroughly and carefully I plan my work. Grr! Since nobody from PP commented anything for over a week, let me increase my posting frequency (cuz this friggin place once more is about as lively as a sodding morgue as of late!).

Next item on my schedule is a series of tests on the subject of waste bunkers. Or waste areas, since I hope I can manage to cover considerable swathes of the course with natural wasteland meshes, said meshes looking much better than mere Unity terrain textures.

I started by doing some figuring out on the course overhead view. This is a genuine work document, the yellow patches are potential waste areas: big chunks of real eastate that will shout "don't go there" at the players from far away. And - should this work out - another visual element that will allievate the ever-same uniformity of rough-fairway-green repetitions.

The diagram top right symbolizes that the waste areas always should be below the nearest fairway, always sloping down away from it. 

 

 

Next, I went and prepared suitable textures, 2 of them. The first is a standard dirt soil.

 

 

And the second one a bit more riotous, the "special effects" child texture which I plan to use to make the inside ground of the waste zone a bit more lively:

 

 

Both textures are seamless. The production process for seamless textures is always the same: Download some 20 dirt/sand/soil texture from Google image, pick 3 or 4 of them, superimpose and arrange them in Photoshop, apply an Offset filter (warped) and cover up the central edges with a clone brush.

 

Next, I will need some shaders that will let me add some bumps and small, uneven structures to my new textures. I will see how this goes tomorrow. On wednesday I will import these into CF and take them for a test drive.

[Ted_Ball]

That looks thorough and carefully planned.  Great work.  Envious.

[Kablammo11]

Too late, Teddy!      

[Dazmaniac]

Flitting back to The Avengers.

 

Not sure how true it is, or just an urban myth, but Diana Rigg's character - Emma Peel - was so named as they wanted a character that had man appeal, so abbreviating to m appeal ended up with the character called Emma Peel.

 

Might be true, might be bollocks, lol.

[Kablammo11]

That's what I heard, too: Her name is a pun.

There is no doubting, however, the true intention behind the name of the James Bond character of "Pussy Galore" - which, incidentally, was played by the british actress Honor Blackman, who, pretty much at the same time as the shooting of Goldfinger took place, also played the precursor of Diana Rigg as the female partner of John Steed. Her screen name in the very early Avengers series was "Cathy Gale". 

 

[Ted_Ball]

Oh come on. Can they compete with the young Julie Christie in A for Andromeda.

 

 

I had absolutely no idea what was going on but I've always wanted a Julie Christie android as a special friend.

[Kablammo11]

So much for staying on topic. Every time I mention Tara, an avalanche of distracting comments buries the course design infos. Enough with this idle chit-chat! Those who wish to discuss black and white grainy females from better times long past, kindly open a thread of your own under Off-Topic.

 

Anways... waste areas.

This morning, I created a small patch off the beaten tracks for a field test of this new element.

 

 

Just the essential few bits for a bit of quiet contemplation. I imported my new textures and shaders, cloned my bunker preset into a new layer (16 waste) and calculated, only to find that - as far as first go's go - this one was not that bad:

 

 

But of course it wasn't good either. The lip material was all wrong, the effect was too sandy, the colors was too far off etc, ec, etc...

So first I gave the lip a rough material and madie it much wider and blending softly... better.

 

 

There followed a lengthy period of texture switching, color correction in Photoshop, tile size assessing, foolish desperation, until I ended up with the following, that posessed the texture and feel I was looking for:

 

 

Unfortunately, it also possessed a bug. Yup, all you Emmalists und Juliaphiles, we're still in beta, where things occasionally turn nasty and other things go bump under the bed.

 

 

That single horizontal plane - without a wireframe mesh! - should not be there. In all fairness, it also could be a wrong setting from me. The Layers Library is easy enough to use, but once you start adding lips and fringes and shrinkages and whatnots, it can turn on you quicker than a spinning derwish. (axe, look away: this ain't drag and drop territory)

Either way, I must report back, ask for directions, beg for help and wait helplessly for a week or so... The waste area construction at Willow Heath is halted, effective immediately, until further notice.

[Ted_Ball]

You might need nGons.

[shimonko]

I think your settings are feasible - I tried your exact settings and didn't get the missing mesh, even pushing bend tightness to the max. (Of course going too tight can cause meshing problems but I would expect to see your terrain texture in the bad section, not your bunker texture.) 

 

Did the vertical wall disappear in game mode or when building? And have you tweaked the position of the spline points to see if it disappears?

 

 

[Kablammo11]

Thanks for making the effort, shimonko. My wall is horizontal, actually, and it's more like a extra texture plane suspended over the original texture. I tried to shift a few control points, but not many of them, and I agree with you that it does not look like a common mesh-salad type of display error. I did not check in game mode (and I can't build anything). I will try these things once my shattered confidence is reporting back for duty. 

In your lower image, as well as in mine, I don't particularly like the look of the very straight, unnatural ridge that is created in the surrouding lip section.

[Kablammo11]

And whilst typing the above reply, true story, my eye fell on the image I had posted further above. Observe the wireframe, see if you notice something...

 

 

What caught my attention was a possible trouble spot in the upper right hand corner, where the spline makes almost a straight angle. I immediately shouted for my shattered confidence, that btw was sitting in the next room chatting quietly with Tara, to return into the line of fire with me. We hastened to the scene of the crime anon, and due to a stroke a luck (or a senile manipulation error) I clicked on the defective shape and received the object highlight grid (instead of the general wireframe view). That brought things into a new visual focus.

 

 

The plot thickened. And no, Teddy, nGons had nothing to do with it. This view pointed straight at the real culprit: Me. A little bit of me, because I should stayed cool and figured out the issue in less than 5 minutes. But also it pointed mainly at:

 

 

Long story short: My maxing of the Width and Blend value for the Fringe and the Lip and created a control point situation where tight corners immediately would cause problems. They expanded the area-to-be-recalculated so much, made it so broad, that building automatic connenctions to neighbouring vertices became much harder than usual, it seems. To get rid of this issue I re-arranged outer control points manually, got rid of the shrink functuion altogether, changed the meters per point and point per meters and grid value settings. 

I can now safely say that it wasn't a bug. It was me - and the systemic nature of CF/Unity inadvertently conspiring to create a mess.

Maybe this genuine slice of life fresh from the swashbuckling adventures of a beta-testing course designer will make you see that it's a hard and dangerous job, with some ups and lots of downs. Operation waste area will resume in the morning.

 

 

Weirdly enough, too, shimonko's image also shows a few mesh conflicts...

[shimonko]

I think the same problems are there with the samples I did, it's just not as obvious.

[axe360]

Wow, all this, just to make a waste bunker.. I doubt I'll live that long....

[Kablammo11]

I hear you, axe. I, too, very often feel betrayed and angered by this stubborn universe who refuses to obediently deliver to me everything I desire - and at the very moment at which I crave it.   

Take solace in the fact that it's my job as a test pilot to fly this plane to its limits and beyond, with the explicit purpose of inducing educational crashes just like this one.

 

This morning, I picked one hole to see how my new design element would fare. I chose the 16th, Benny. There are 24 minutes of not-at-all strenuous work between the first and the second of the images that follow.

 

 

Since every mesh needs to be encompassed by rough, I had to bulge out my existing rough mesh to accomodate the waste areas. A bit of elevation adjustment ensued, and finally some grass and tree replanting.

I asked Monochromatic Golferella to stand in for me for the next image series, so that you could see the dimensions. She may not be the most spectacular of my all assistants (she is the most specular, though - lol, texture joke), but at least MG causes less of a Forum stir than the local diva, TK. 4 images of the 2 new waste areas on Benny coming right up:

 

(ugh - triple same tree in the left half of background! Gotta re-plant...)

 

And now what? Now I will sleep over it. Seriously! Always helps sto re-visit this kind of work with a fresh mind. To wit: Having been occupied with the waste areas turned me completely blind to the very obvious 3 tree clones in the second-to-last image. These triplets must be broken up, it wouldn't do to let them stand in such a copy-pasted manner (Not here that is, TGC is full of wooden clone armies...). Also, the fairway bunkers could do with a bit more hollowing out.

And not while I was there, in Unity, but instead only now, by staring at the image, my spider senses started tingling... Taking a step back is very helpful.

 

I will need to test what happens if I add child meshes to add some variety to the waste areas (also to cover any sort of tiling that might be happening). I also want to try to plant some dense grass over the outside border of a waste area, to make a softer transition from it into nature.

Once these things are sorted and if, in a couple days, I still don't feel that this sucks, I will proceed to the mass production of these babies.

[axe360]

Just a little humor my friend..This is just the way new things are, it may have taken you 24 mins, the first time, 15 the second and maybe 5 mins thereafter.. Same with the CA, somethings are complicated at first but once you get the hang of it, bam, there actually simple...

I really like what I am seeing, keep it up... Keep blazing that unknown trail for us.....

[FixAmer1st]

Great views K11.  As many others have said I can not wait to tee up a ball on your course.

 

If you are such a blind person to multiple cloned trees, I never noticed them either so I muct be blind too.

So in re-looking over the other views, in the bottom right of the 2nd view, there are more two clones there. The two with the light colored trunks.  Or at least they look the same to me.  But again, until I went looking for some I had never noticed them either and they would not have bothered me.

 

Jerry

[Kablammo11]

I see them, thanks Jerry. Nasty buggers, those birches! I'm sure there must be other clones in my images; it happens a lot and can't be avoided all the time. I agree that most people do not see this stuff, because their eyes aren't trained to register it. But once seen it can't be un-seen again. It would be futile for me to go hunting after every bit of slightly iffy vegetation, but those that appear on my radar must be dealt with - some sort of designer OCD, I suppose...

[Kablammo11]

...returning to the unfolding drama, I had mentioned earlier that I was not satisfied yet with the outer rim of my test zone. Waste zones are tricky insofar as close to the golf course they should be very much in play, catching stray shots, whereas the further away from the official playing surfaces they reach, they are basically nothing more than untamed nature, left to itself. So how to make the transition from playing hazard to open land?

(Waste areas are not a real golf hazard, btw. Players may ground their club in them.)

 

The answer is the same as with the riparian sitation: cover the offending (outside) border with grass, bushes, rocks. Like so:

 

 

The waste area elements are now officially in place, the textures and suitable grass billboards assigned, the underlying design guidelines formalized. One more night to sleep over it. If it still doesn't suck in the morning, I will start upgrading the other holes accordingly.

[mcthommo]

K11- this is looking so good, it's a piece of art that hopefully sooner rather than later we will have the honour of being able to tee it up and playing this wee gem.

I hope you do keep up this fantastic work in progress and will keep my fingers well and truly crossed that you might try and do a links course- my ultimate favourite

McT

[Kablammo11]

Thanks. My next one will definitely be a (fictitional) links course, with adjoined fairways and 9 huge double greens for 18 holes: It will be called the Black Swan. Unless by then pot bunkers have still not been made available...

But I'm not going to start a new project before this is not done and dusted - and playable in PG.