76 replies to this topic

[mikahenrik]

I think your course plays as it should. An old school 

setup of soft/bumpy fairways and greens at a lower stimp under

breezy/gusty conditions was extremely fun to me.

You have captured the early essence of how golf was played

and my vote is to keep it as is. Great Job.

 

Thanks I will take your advise on this one and keep it as it is. I have to say I like the bumpy green settings with slower speeds on this course.

[pingzing]

Awesome course mika. left post over at OGT

 

thanks 

[ArisFuser]

This course looks to be one of the best ever to be released for JNPG yet,...a new milestone in some aspects. Eagerly awaiting for release, thanks a lot Mika.

[Mike Jones]

Probably the most advanced course technically and artistically created for PG so far - well done an amazing effort. The dunes areas are nothing short of breathtaking.

[Quigs]

Thought the course played great. Greens can be tricky but at the right stimp I thought fair. Thanks for all the hard work!

[mikahenrik]

Thanks Aris, Mike, Quigs and all for your kind comments. Do appreciate your words a lot. It's getting there and hopefully will be finished soon. Had a good round of testing today. Little skins game over the last 8 holes.

 

 

What happened there? Well, Dustin pulled a 3 footer on the 18th Igor is one of the owners. Drives long and loves to gamble. Everyone calls him John.

 

Cheers Mika

[Mike Jones]

If you want to mute the bright green tree, you can go into the prefab and change its colour/lightness slightly then regenerate the material. Generally the speedtree trees are too light by default and I think a little bit of playing with the speedtree hues would help them gel with the amazing terrain work.

[pingzing]

I see Mike used the words breathtaking, thats a line out of Seinfeld-trip down to the hamptons ,nice one mike

 

Mika can you post up some tips and pics with settings etc  on making those bunkers, there breathtaking  -

 

Well done 

[mikahenrik]

If you want to mute the bright green tree, you can go into the prefab and change its colour/lightness slightly then regenerate the material. Generally the speedtree trees are too light by default and I think a little bit of playing with the speedtree hues would help them gel with the amazing terrain work.

 

Thanks I'll try adjusting these little. I was kind of comfortable about being ignorant of this. Now all I see is green trees

[mikahenrik]

I see Mike used the words breathtaking, thats a line out of Seinfeld-trip down to the hamptons ,nice one mike

 

Mika can you post up some tips and pics with settings etc  on making those bunkers, there breathtaking  -

 

Well done 

 

Hi,

 

Here are the bunker settings I used.These and the texture settings are posted in the OGT forums if someone is interested. Some bunkers are just normal bunkers with dirt lip running around them. I'm afraid there is no short way of telling or showing how to make bunkers look good. It's more than just lip settings.

 

 

If you think about beautiful eyes. What makes them beautiful is not much about the eyes at all. It's about distance between them. How they relate to other facial features. Orientation of them and any bias or prejudice we may have about the person carrying them. You need to have the bunker lip and the shape right but bunkers also need to fit into the landscape. So often ignored in modern golf design when designer and the grew building them are not on the same page we get bunkers with good detail but they appear like they come from a mass production line, copied, pasted and rotated.

 

Try keeping this short. Bear in mind this all comes from someone without any qualifications or expertise into landscape or golf design. Be sceptical what's written.

 

Try building bunkers in natural hollows and not force them into drive landings etc. Spend more time into planning your course routing to have the features in right places. This is a real bummer. It took me more than 50 % of time to just flying around the landscape trying to figure out the good holes. Of course you can take a short cut and cheat and shape the terrain as you go but it's really easy to lose those little imperfections or make them appear in too convenient places and lose some natural appearance.

 

Then there is 1 unwritten rule about modern design I very much disagree. Modern bunkers are often build with them being visible from the tee or the ideal point of approach on the fairway. (There are some claims, I consider just parrot talk, that makes this approach little more sensible in real life but we can ignore these uncomfortable realities to keep this short). Individual bunker looks nice but as a whole it may feel like something is not quite right with all bunkers popping at your eyes all facing same direction. Also bunkers are hazards they can be blind/surprising.

 

Don't build too many bunkers. What I had here was very untamed landscape to begin with. It didn't need all the bunkers to create interest and I did ignore the uncomfortable reality that often most rounds played are stroke play rounds by 20+ handicappers. To make the course too busy with bunkers is very easy if you pepper the green surrounds with them and can easily ruin the fun.

 

Copy the right kind of landscape. Google old images of great courses and try to figure out how they looked liked when they were build to get the landscape right. In my opinion there is no point in looking at how individual bunker looks like. If you manage to convince the viewer about the whole landscape the details appear much better looking.

 

Mika

[mikahenrik]

Couple of examples of bunkers. What you see in the first picture is the fairway bunker from the 6th. If you play the course you will see it's a cheat. There was little hillock and small depression but you can see it's slightly forced in there. It also appears perfectly across the fairway around 260m carry over from the back tees. Maybe a little uneventful birdie hole would have fit better in here but I'll let myself get away with it because I kind of wanted the course to be continuous roller coaster rather than course that fits for all levels and kinds of players.

 

 

This second picture is good for two examples. Those are bunkers around the drive landing on 14th. Both were placed in the hollows already in the ground. The bunker further up is again one that you may try to carry over if you going for 2 on the green. Unlike the bunker on six this appears at right distance because I moved the tees in the right distance. The little bunker in the beginning of the fairway adds nothing positive to the strategy of the hole instead makes the landing area slightly too small. It's just one of those imperfections what you have when you try to mimic a course build hundred years back and if you get rid of all that it doesn't appear as a course it was intended.

 

 

I don't know if these are good examples but hope these help to show what I meant earlier.

[pingzing]

Mika thanks buddy

Very good and detailed info , and yes google images is your friend, i have done this a few times to get ideas.

So bunker lip is a bit deeper and you used just the bunker spline only, you didnt add another one inside to get those 

advanced shapes like dp and the dr.

 

In other golf games when designing  you can randomly design a bare plot with as a much elevation as you want to start with, then you plan out your holes from there, looking for rises.valleys and you can roughly mark out tee and greens and then away you go, like you mentioned look for natural low areas for bunkers etc.

 

So basically you let the plot/terrain dictate where holes will go, this is much more natural and not forced, i like this approach.

Would be good to have an option in CF where you can generate plots automatically or just make your own fron your ideas you have

 

Cheers mate

[mikahenrik]

Mika thanks buddy

Very good and detailed info , and yes google images is your friend, i have done this a few times to get ideas.

So bunker lip is a bit deeper and you used just the bunker spline only, you didnt add another one inside to get those 

advanced shapes like dp and the dr.

 

In other golf games when designing  you can randomly design a bare plot with as a much elevation as you want to start with, then you plan out your holes from there, looking for rises.valleys and you can roughly mark out tee and greens and then away you go, like you mentioned look for natural low areas for bunkers etc.

 

So basically you let the plot/terrain dictate where holes will go, this is much more natural and not forced, i like this approach.

Would be good to have an option in CF where you can generate plots automatically or just make your own fron your ideas you have

 

Cheers mate

 

Yes the bunker lip is a bit deeper and didn't add another inside. The blend is there to break the sharp string like appearance. I did try few different bunker styles and found this to be good enough. Also took some time carefully shaping the bottom of the bunkers and pulling the spline anchor points in right places.

 

It's good idea to have auto terrain generator but I doubt it's quite that easy to make one that creates interesting landscapes with enough natural looking detail good for golf course. Maybe some tools to have wind erosion, coastal/tidal erosion etc. would help but you can also find these tools for Unity. Instead of having an auto generated terrain I would simply import a detailed real life terrain ideal for golf (sand dunes etc.).

[DPRoberts]

Mika,

Your work is inspiring. I sat on the coastal holes and admired the hills for several minutes. Can't help but wonder and no one has seemed to comment, how the hell did you create the color pulsing effect on the Unity grasses? Not realistic but fun to watch. It's like the grass is breathing.

[mikahenrik]

Mika,

Your work is inspiring. I sat on the coastal holes and admired the hills for several minutes. Can't help but wonder and no one has seemed to comment, how the hell did you create the color pulsing effect on the Unity grasses? Not realistic but fun to watch. It's like the grass is breathing.

 

I have no idea what you mean but if it's something good it most likely was created by chance

[DPRoberts]

Ha. It appears it is the healthy/dry grass color choice for billboard grasses. As I set them to white/white, this is something I never noticed before.

In game, fly above your grass about 6m and watch it. It ossicilates in color between a green that blends in and an orange hue every 5 seconds or so. Interesting.

[pingzing]

Ha. It appears it is the healthy/dry grass color choice for billboard grasses. As I set them to white/white, this is something I never noticed before.

In game, fly above your grass about 6m and watch it. It ossicilates in color between a green that blends in and an orange hue every 5 seconds or so. Interesting.

Good spot there Dp, i did admire the grasses and their colours , there smaller in height too, i like adding varying height of grasses , will check that out  again and take a closer look 

[mikahenrik]

Ha. It appears it is the healthy/dry grass color choice for billboard grasses. As I set them to white/white, this is something I never noticed before.

In game, fly above your grass about 6m and watch it. It ossicilates in color between a green that blends in and an orange hue every 5 seconds or so. Interesting.

 

Ok now I get it. Yes I just changed the dry/healthy colors. Some are dark/brown/grey some lighter/yellow/green depending on the color of the grass. And yes set the min. max. heights for sure. Then pulled the noise spread around 3 here. I just play with the numbers and try stop when they look decent. I'm not too afraid if they look little over the top as long as they look good.

[mikahenrik]

Some background what I did here with the landscape. First I Googled location I had visited few times in real life and thought would be nice place for a golf course. Tried to figure out how to get the landscape into Unity but soon gave up and just roughly picked up some elevations and features from memory. Low level dunes near the sea, different set of higher older dunes (appears like ridge covered with trees but some dune shapes are still there) where the tree line starts then lower forested area continuing inland. I have no idea if my way of seeing the landscape is true, but by following some set of "logic" helps to mimic the laws of physics nature follows.

 

 

 

 

If you don't enjoy the landscaping part and can get a good data of real world location maybe just better tweaking that around.

 

I like to have a theme or idea about the landscape completed with details before building a course or at least keep the big picture in mind when sculpting the course/terrain later. If I cannot imagine the landscape what I'm trying to replicate it's very difficult to make anything appear natural. Nothing stopping you from changing the theme if you later think your landscape looks something other than what you planned.

 

Did all the sculpting with Unity brushes. After all major terrain work I made some noise with Terrain Toolkit. That was some time ago (maybe 3 years or more) and I never used this in same project with CF so don't know if there are any issues to consider. It had nice erosion tool to give nice coating to the terrain. If I remember correct I may have flattened the whole terrain few times so be careful with these. It took time to get it right and some courses I've made with free hand sculpting were faster to do. And soon you will get better with sculpting and can create the same effects on your own. Someone else know about a "magic wand" for terrain editing/creation?

 

I always keep 3-4 courses under construction. When I hit the wall I move on to the other. Instead of banging your head in the wall for 2 months, do another course maybe get some nice ideas and come back later to fix/finish it in 2 hours I started the red course for Great River some two months with all the holes down just not happy with some details. Never know if/when that will be finished.

 

Mika

[pingzing]

Very informative mika! how you go about course  design and your thought process...

Appreciate the pictures and detailed info, there`s some great tips in here for everyone

and will copy and paste this , i use similar ideas when i design as well.

 

Thank you mate