40 replies to this topic

[Kablammo11]

Well, I have been prepping ficitional golf courses in Unity, currently working on my 6th project, "The Lothian" (think Muirfield and British Open)...

Anyway, I suddenly felt some of my efforts might come to naught if I did not get a few key figures about Terrain settings right. So I would like to ask for them here:

 

• What is the recommended heightmap resolution for the Course Forge? 513? 1025? 2049?...???

• What is the recommended detail resolution for the Course Forge?

• What is the recommended control texture resolution for the Course Forge?

• Should the Unity terrain be given a shader material, for instance to apply bump-mapped textures? Which?

• Vegetation - will any additional tree, bush and grass models ship with the CourseForge - or are we on our own?

 

Thank you and Ka-Boom!

[IanD]

These are good questions and hopefully will see some details about them explained. I'm guessing Mike is liable to include alot of these in some form of documentation in the Course Forge release, but this would certainly aid in ensuring those beginning have some definitive parameters to best work to.

[Keith]

Well, I have been prepping ficitional golf courses in Unity, currently working on my 6th project, "The Lothian" (think Muirfield and British Open)...

Anyway, I suddenly felt some of my efforts might come to naught if I did not get a few key figures about Terrain settings right. So I would like to ask for them here:

 

• What is the recommended heightmap resolution for the Course Forge? 513? 1025? 2049?...???

• What is the recommended detail resolution for the Course Forge?

• What is the recommended control texture resolution for the Course Forge?

• Should the Unity terrain be given a shader material, for instance to apply bump-mapped textures? Which?

• Vegetation - will any additional tree, bush and grass models ship with the CourseForge - or are we on our own?

 

Thank you and Ka-Boom!

I hope someone lurking can answer these questions.  I asked the one about Vegetation awhile back and got no reply. 

[Kablammo11]

I don't think they are lurking, WDK, that is too sinister an activity for the creators of a Forum. And they do not owe us anything, either - the commercial reality is that they do all the work, yet we have not payed them a cent for it. Hardly the makings for a partnership of equals.

 

Still, whereas they are not at all forced to answer, we can still post our questions. Like these...

 

• Terrain Settings: Recommended Values for "Pixel Error" and "Base Map Distance"?

• Billboards: What are the recommended values for Tree Distance, Billboard Start and Fade Length for best Course Forge performance?

• Billboards (2): I take it that distant trees, not anywhere near the playing area, can and should be defined as 2D billboards only, right?

                          So can we go and start making 2D cutouts, same as we did in APCD?

• Wind: Unity Terrain settings allow setting of wind speed and size - will this translate into Course Forge 1:1?

             We will probably need to create a wind zone, too, covering the whole terrain...  Where is 0 degree in X/Z terms?

• Skyboxes: Adding a landscape panorma (like the mountains you used for Crystal Pines and test area).

                   Can we do this by editing our landscapes into Unity default skyboxes and will they then be imported into the course data?

• Skyboxes (2): There was mention of moving clouds - probably a translucent cloud box within the skybox? Need we address this?

• Fog/Haze: If defined in the Render Settings, will fog effects later be included by the Course Forge?

 

There's lots more, but let's wait for the lurkers to catch up...   

[Mike Jones]

 

 

• Terrain Settings: Recommended Values for "Pixel Error" and "Base Map Distance"?

 

Pixel error 1 - gives better terrain resolution, we may have this indirectly changeable as part of our in game graphics settings, Base map distance just leave at default

• Billboards: What are the recommended values for Tree Distance, Billboard Start and Fade Length for best Course Forge performance?

 

It doesn't matter as these will all be alterable via in game settings, meanwhile set them to whatever suits your computer speed when creating. Personally I use Tree distance 2000, max mesh trees 200, Billboard start 300, Fade length default

• Billboards (2): I take it that distant trees, not anywhere near the playing area, can and should be defined as 2D billboards only, right?

                          So can we go and start making 2D cutouts, same as we did in APCD?

 

You can't define a tree as a 'billboard' it's based on the vicinity of the camera location. You can however create lower polygon tree models to plant off the beaten path if you want to.

• Wind: Unity Terrain settings allow setting of wind speed and size - will this translate into Course Forge 1:1?

 

 

             We will probably need to create a wind zone, too, covering the whole terrain...  Where is 0 degree in X/Z terms?

 

Ourmain wind settings are defined via a game object, we use this currently but will probably develop a custom solution in the future of swirling winds and different wind levels based on height and tree coverage 

 

0 = 12 o clock 

 

 

• Skyboxes: Adding a landscape panorma (like the mountains you used for Crystal Pines and test area).

                   Can we do this by editing our landscapes into Unity default skyboxes and will they then be imported into the course data?

 

You can do this or create an outer ring of polygons and map a texture with apha to them or you can use mesh objects for distant terrain. Lot's of panorama solutions if you're creative

• Skyboxes (2): There was mention of moving clouds - probably a translucent cloud box within the skybox? Need we address this?

 

No, we are currently using static skyboxes until we have time and resources to develop our own weather engine

• Fog/Haze: If defined in the Render Settings, will fog effects later be included by the Course Forge?

 

Fog effects from Unity are used. We will have an in game interface for mist levels in game settings

 

There's lots more, but let's wait for the lurkers to catch up...   

 

I'm not lurking, just busy!

[Kablammo11]

Thank you very much. Any reason why you would skip over the original post?

[Turner]

"I'm not lurking, just busy!"

I'm guessing that would be the reason.

[Kablammo11]

Bump for some attention to the original post and the still unanswered questions therein

[Andrew]

I will discuss a little bit about heightmaps.  We are currently in the process of building our first fully georeferenced golf course for an interesting project.  In Unity the bottom left is 0,0 so before I get into the resolution of the heightmaps if you are ever grabbing real terrain data and imagery then I highly recommend keeping a note of the lowest X,Y values inside the UTM projections which will be the bottom left corner.  The latest alpha of course forge has a spot to enter these values.

Having said that unfortunatly there is no single answer to your question, if you are building a real course and have high resolution terrain data I would go with a 4096 heightmap as you will not have much terrain modelling to do.  If you have lower resolution data and will have to do quite a bit of terrain modling I would recommend a 2048 heightmap.  Of course this assumes you are doing a whole course around 1600x1600 wide.  If you were working on a smaller plot say 500x500 I would reduce these values.

The rest I dont know much about I seem to recall Control Resolution being set to 2048 and I have never applied a bump map to our terrain texture.

As to Vegetation I don think we have made a decision.  Our goal is to have some vegetation packs to be provided on release.

[Kablammo11]

Thanks Andrew

So if I had a terrain of 1600 by 1600 meters and had the heightmap resolution set to 4096, that would mean that I would get a height vertex every 40 centimeters (1'3")? (4096:1600= 2.56 vertexes per meter)

Such a resolution would be ludicrously high for certain parts of the fairway and for the surrounding landscape, not requiring that much detail at all, but about right for the greens. 

I asked because I'm one of the ficitional course fashioners who does not care one jot about already existing courses - it's quite hard for us freestylers to feel safe about anything on the Unity-end of the course design bargain. If I set the heightmap too high or too low on my projects, I'm pretty much stuck with that choice - I could export a RAW heightmap I suppose, and re-import it at a higher or lower resolution, but I'm yet to try and find out if this does accurately translate across dimensions. And my concern is, of course, that maxing heightmap resolution might be detrimental to the PC performance in the finished product.

Great news about the vegetation: The current free Unity choices, including the extra terrain content, are a bit limited. I can paint my own grass, but I haven't figured out how to import detail mesh objects like heather and gorse (won't work), and I find the Unity tree creator to be, well, atrociously unfriendly.

[Lukas]

I could export a RAW heightmap I suppose, and re-import it at a higher or lower resolution, but I'm yet to try and find out if this does accurately translate across dimensions.

 

I can confirm that this works and does not alter the dimensions. It does create some "stepping" with the surfaces, but this can be fixed by running a large smoothing brush over the area.

[Kablammo11]

Good to know, Lukas. thanks. 

[Andrew]

Yeah if you are going fictional I would use a lower resolution say 2048x2048 otherwise you will find molding the terrain very difficult due to the small brush size/  you could probably even go as low as 1024 but if you get too low you lose the ability to fine tune the terrain for green elevations

[Mike Jones]

When I created the PGA range from scratch I started with a 128x128 pixel heightmap and gradually 'upped' it's resolution as I got down to the final details later. It's a 2 minute job to export the heightmap from unity and change its size in photoshop or similar and then import back in at the higher resolution.

[Keith]

Thnx for the answers in this thread guys.  Mike, are any more tutorials planned?  Would like to some day see how CF handles water hazzards and such.  Is it pretty much the same as dropping a water plane on a Unity landscape?

[Mike Jones]

Yes there will be loads more tutorials when CF goes into beta. I didn't see much point creating more tutorials when you guys still don't have the tools, it's just too much of a tease!

[Kablammo11]

Thnx for the answers in this thread guys.  Mike, are any more tutorials planned?  Would like to some day see how CF handles water hazzards and such.  Is it pretty much the same as dropping a water plane on a Unity landscape?

 

My guess is that if you use the basic, free Unity app you will get the standard water features, which is basically water planes that you can drag into the scene. They are very simple,  gloppy-looking things with very few choices for colors and wave frequency. They do not reflect the landscape or allow specular highlights to reflect the sun, they just lie there like flat, sirupy, water things who do look barely adequate from 1000 yards away but do not pass muster when exposed to closer scrutiny.

I'm pretty sure that THIS (click on "THIS"), can not be accomplished with the free version of Unity and with the CourseForge. I'm referring to the water, not the bulkheads. 

There is an advanced water package for 75 $ in the Unity Store that should offer more, and I might even be willing to purchase it at a later date, but not before the game is out, the Forge is working and my design workflow has been stabilized. It might offer more realistic waves, but I don't know if it allows for streaming whitewater or slow, rolling ocean breakers. As for waterfalls like in the PGA Range, which I haven't seen myself yet due to the Windows-centric Macastrophy that is PP, I would suspect that these are made by particle effects.

Getting, creating and including some good water stuff into my course designs is currently my biggest worry. 

[Mike Jones]

"Windows-centric Macastrophy that is PP"  

LOL I hear you and we're on it!

[Acrilix]

@K11 - I know it's frustrating for you, but you can't really blame PP for not making Mac versions of alphas a top priority. From the Operating System Poll results, only 7 people from the 173 who voted are using Macs.

[Kablammo11]

@ MJ: Andrew said so as well and I believe and trust you to come through with it... eventually... In the fullness of time... willy-nilly... 

 

@ Acrilix: When it says "PC & Mac", I tend to expect Mac. When there is Unity behind it, I definitely ask for Mac. If I raise a bit of a stink about it now, it's mostly to nip this vexing cavalier attitude of "Macs can wait"  in the bud. Cuz this is how it starts and it gets only worse with time if there isn't anybody around to call foul. Think of me as the special envoy of Macdom to PP, and of my job here to be the cantankerous A...hole on behalf of my tribe. I'm not blaming PP for being macphobic or macasthenic. I'm just nagging them because this is my duty.

 

@ Both of you! Now harken, my beauties, you both are way off topic and what irritates me most is MJ lolling away at a rateher secondary detail just to be able to shirk the delicate water issue. Now, about water stuff and Unity... pray continue... I'm listening...