Reticulating Splines

(Let's see how many of you remember that line from Sim City 2000)

Ok so I wanted my first dev blog post, as lead programmer, to be about one of my favorite things: splines!

As many of you who have developed virtual courses know, spline tools are essential to the design process. They are often used to define basic shapes for bunkers, fairways, greens, etc. - which further define vertices and polygons that eventually make up a hole.

Well for our course designer tool, we decided to leverage the power of splines as much as possible so that you can spend more time drawing out and designing your course, and less time adding and manipulating individual vertices. The result is a very powerful parametric spline tool that allows for varying degrees of detail and automation for different course components. For instance, say you wanted to create a bunker. Using our spline tool you can outline the shape of the bunker you want, leave the default bunker automation parameters as they are, hit generate, and a bunker equipped with an automated dirt lip, textures, normals and smooth tesselation  is created on-the-fly:


This image is the result of bunker automation with default parameters.

Different bunker parameters will affect the automation process, creating different essential types, while further editing features allow the meticulous to fine tune.

Our goal was to take out a lot of the tedious work involved with designing courses without getting in the way of creativity, and as this tool develops further we will continue to adhere to that goal.