389 replies to this topic

[✠ davef ✠]

wheres the course, maybe a designer of pretty pics

but have yet to see a course

[granite00]

After all this work, one would think this course could be released as a beta while the designer continues perfecting his technique.

[DPRoberts]

Dave,

I totally get what you are saying here as thinking Birdie is a tease. However, this is the Show and Tell thread which is really meant for designers and not players or those wanting some finished result. That would be in Community Course discussion.

 

Many moons ago (2014), K11 created a Show and Tell thread in the beta forum. It was amazing, insightful, thorough and well ahead of its time in educating many to come along later. It took him (not entirely his doing as he waited on developers) about 1.5 years to put out his first course. Why is this important? Well, all the designers that have come later have benefited in some way or another from K11's assistance. Mike's original tutorials as well. K11's first course may have taken a few months. Later, he solved issues, grew in comfort, anticipated issues and probably could crank a fantasy course out in a few weeks. 

 

All the designers stand on the shoulders of those who came before us or those ideas that exist in the Youtube or Google links. K11 created the first wave of development and progress with JNPG. Birdie is developing something quite revolutionary that we may or may not benefit from. He is expanding the courses graphically beyond what we have been limited by in our current way of thinking/skillset with Unity.

 

What Birdie promotes here is not for you and quite possibly not for many. However, if he succeeds, you may eventually benefit from his findings. We have briefly benefited from his 3D grass findings. But, I would say what he is doing now is much more revolutionary in pushing us toward photorealistic results, which is much more difficult to achieve and time consuming.

 

The only area I believe Birdie may be falling short of K11's efforts is that K11 was a master in relaying what he was doing and how he was doing it. Nothing beats a K11 tutorial, either in written form or video.

 

To that end, I love what you are doing Birdie. However, it would be nice if your photos came with a little insight into the trees and the ground cover there.

 

Trees - are they SpeedTrees? are they Maxtrees as you say? - what software have you finalized the trees? if you have 1 material per tree - is it LODing as well?

 

Ground cover - this does not seem to be run of the mill terrain painting. Is this still Unity mesh?

 

Dave - I guess I would say - think of this thread more as Artstation which is a place you would not be bothered to go usually. It is a place where those interested in 3D golf course creation/environmental art can go in this forum and you happen to have access to it. 

[Birdie]

Thanks DP for your constructive criticism and kind words!

I'll try to give some insight how i do things but if i would try to make detailed tutorials it would take ages...

There is so much trial and error and manual editing i even wouldn't know where to start. But some things are quite simple to follow by just showing a few screens and the tools used.

The ground is still an exported PP spline mesh obj. It got a displacement modifier in Blender, here a displacement map of a jungle roots material and then converted back to mesh. You could also achieve this effect in Unity alone through this tessellation/displacement shader we already talked about but the benefit of doing it in Blender is you then can make the Player actually stand on the mesh because the displacement got converted to mesh. Doing the displacement only by shader the player sinks a bit to the original mesh.

In this link you can see how to convert a displacement map to mesh in Blender. Looks complicated but you don't need all of this node stuff. The important things are subdividing some steps, applying the displacement map/modifier, converting back to mesh and finally decimating the mesh again for performance while keeping the details acceptable.

Trial and error...

Here is a screen of the final ground mesh. Displaced to get these root structures a bit 3d but also quite heavily decimated.

The material is some combination of Quixel Mixer stuff and manual texture editing.

 

For these rocks i used some Megascans rock "assemblies". That's some 3d object of a few meters of ground plus rocks. An example... https://quixel.com/m...e?assetId=plhwP

I simply pushed them through the ground so only the rocks are kept visible. Makes the color matching much easier.

From this...

To this...

 

 

The Maxtree stuff is really experimental atm.

I imported them to Blender, decimated the geometry quite heavily. Probably makes sense to first split the model into parts "by material" so you can keep the trunks a bit more detailed for example. I then joined all parts again and used a free material combiner to atlas all materials ( https://vrcat.club/t...n-2-1-1-5.2255/ ) .

Then i imported the decimated Maxtree fbx as a mesh frond in Speedtree and applied the generated atlas. As the wind type i use "Palm". You don't have all these wind options like on multimaterial trees but with the "Palm" type you have quite some control to make it look acceptable. But you have to tweak the wind carefully.

One problem is sadly a mesh frond doesn't support tiling textures so the trunks textures on some models looked a bit stretched in Unity/PG. For now I somehow solved this by separating trunks and leafs for example and importing the trunks separately in Speedtree with the "Include as part of Object" option at mesh import. So you can have tiling textures on this part. 

Regarding LOD, atm i try only LOD0 and an early billboard. But the billboards, like everything..., seem to also need some extra attention...

So, still fighting...

[DPRoberts]

Thank you, Birdie. Those little insights help lead me in the right direction but allow some freedom to find my own way! A bit of experimental time saver as well.

 

I was thinking of creating small "biomes" like you've done with the rocks to use for planting around on a desert/sand type setting. Could probably even do something similar for patchy areas of grass.

 

I wanted to share this video for planting rocks in Blender using weight paint and a particle system. I am debating seeing if I could export my Unity terrain and procedurally plant rocks, finalize them and re-import back to Unity as 1 large prefab containing all the rocks. Not LOD efficient but may not matter. 

 

http://youtu.be/rmf6l0RN-Cc?t=826

[Birdie]

DP, absolutely on your train with the biomes and stuff.

I have a beta of this Blender Scatter ( https://blendermarke...roducts/scatter ) from his early days of development. It's also using the particle system.

I already used it for example on these ferns you see on the ground. These are also Megascans 3d objects. I imported them through Quixel Bridge into Blender and scattered these on this PP mesh obj. Really cool planting stuff. I then joined all ferns, maybe decimated further for performance, and imported the whole to Speedtree mainly to apply wind. For rocks you even don't need Speedtree. On these fern lot i use LOD0 and then just cull the whole thing off as they are actually quite low growing plants.

I also like the idea of these little combined ecosystem 3d models like you can see here. Maybe scroll down the page... ( https://asset_scan_3d.artstation.com/projects/kxnbK )

 

I tried to achieve such thing around this dead trunk. Also used the Scatter tool to place the ferns and grass around the trunk.

 

 

[Birdie]

BTW I really sometimes wish I had chosen a desert type course with not so much trees. There you probably can go a little more crazy with these techniques.

[jurgie]

wheres the course, maybe a designer of pretty pics

but have yet to see a course

Well, I turned 72 in January. I hope I live long enough to be able to have the pleasure of teeing it up on this creation. LOL

[Buck]

Well, I turned 72 in January. I hope I live long enough to be able to have the pleasure of teeing it up on this creation. LOL

 

Me as well - looks gorgeous!

[jt83]

Birdie there's probably 100 interesting things you've done on this project, but all I'd like to know is if you got that water looking so muddy in Unity alone...

[Birdie]

Do you mean the water around the island green? I didn't touch it for quite some time but I think it's the MJocean prefab. So mainly in Unity but as always also some texture edits externally. I use a ground texture in the foam slot to fake some depth. I thing I posted the settings somewhere but will post them again when at home.

[Birdie]

Here are two different ("muddy") water types with the settings used. May not look the same on other courses as the underlying ground (2nd screen) or lighting will also have some influence. In the first it's the MJocean prefab(reflective), in the second it's a river material from AQUAS Water asset(nonreflective).

[Birdie]

BTW, Corona is cured at Southwoods. Bezos invited for a party....

[Mike Jones]

Love this! A real labor of love and pushing the envelope at every step. Maybe a tech alpha would help with just a couple of holes playable so that you can get some feedback from others with different spec machines?

[KChavis]

Do I see actual people at the clubhouse? If so, does that mean we will see gallery's soon?

[Birdie]

Love this! A real labor of love and pushing the envelope at every step. Maybe a tech alpha would help with just a couple of holes playable so that you can get some feedback from others with different spec machines?

I feel the forces and the pressure...
And as i'm definitely interested how this runs on other machines i'll try to prepare one or two tech alphas.

To be serious i sometimes also thought if i should better ask the community if there is interest in a cooperational work to make a release come a little sooner.

[Birdie]

Do I see actual people at the clubhouse? If so, does that mean we will see gallery's soon?

Yes, i always thought this one female looked a little lonely and some people would add to the scene. Then there was a sale at cgtrader and i bought a big set of lowpoly people. Not typical Philippine styled Golf course visitors and not animated but better than nothing. I think it should be possible to some amount to spread some spectators around the course. Important will probably be to cull them out soon enough for performance.
 

[slouis]

The two dimensional figues are okay from a distance but what I'd like to see and I've suggested this before is animated golfers in the distance.  Maybe on the green putting out or on an adjacent hole.  I don't believe any golf game has ever had this.  I've seen lots of games with animated galleries but they never look any good.

[Birdie]

The two dimensional figues are okay from a distance but what I'd like to see and I've suggested this before is animated golfers in the distance.  Maybe on the green putting out or on an adjacent hole.  I don't believe any golf game has ever had this.  I've seen lots of games with animated galleries but they never look any good.

These people are at least 3d. These are not cut-out billboards. Their faces could be a little better close-up viewed but overall it's not that bad. It's this package:

https://www.cgtrader...98-a1c05861a191

[KChavis]

Those 3d people look better than the folks in TGC19....can't wait to see them on the course!