2551 replies to this topic

[shimonko]

I guess 18 times anything is always going to be a lot of work, axe, but remember K11 has been taking it further than the minimum necessary by doing his own textures (which have their quirks) and other objects, and hasn't had the benefit of others carving the way before him. Plus the battles typical with beta software.

 

I really can't see how it could that much quicker unless it just spat out automatically generated courses like TGC.

[axe360]

Oh, I know it is, having designed one or 2 myself with the TW's CA.. Time to design a course is up to the designer in many instances, mine usually took from 3 to 4 months.. Not 8 hours a day of course.. Others have churned them out in as little as 2 to 3 weeks but believe me, it showed...   So, I'm not interested in how fast you can design a course and I don't like what TGC has to offer..

I too want something with much more capabilities, something you know, like CF/Unity....   The TW's Course Architect had a lot of capabilities also but CF/Unity for sure has even more. Able to blend textures is one very important improvement over the TW's CA, among others that I have seen, thanks to this thread..

I like having to do the detail work and having that function...

 

No, K11 is doing just fine, in fact I like to see a designer put a lot of effort into his course, attention to detail is MOST important to me when designing a course...

 

I like something that is a challenge and look forward to trying my hand at it over here, when it all comes out...

I wouldn't want a course architect that took only 2 weeks to design a magnificent course....

 

Trust me, I know, it takes a lot to put yourself out there as K11 has...You open yourself up to many things... It's not an easy thing to do, showing everyone your work while your also testing the whole program out....  It's one thing to have designed many courses, then put your work out there but to do it while in the learning stages, is commendable and appreciated.

 

Take care shimonko, thanks for the reply..

[Mike Jones]

Dang, ya got me there! Oh, wait...

 

 

Google image search: "willow tree autumn" 

 

 

The willow gender of Salix Kaboomensis Magnificens even turns in summer and spring, too. Something to do with iron and/or copper residues in the soil. Okay, I just made that up.

 

Photoshopped!!! 

[Kablammo11]

Thanks you all for your kind words, guys. As I tried to explain in my previous post, I wasn't so much complaining about indifference or fishing for some love, but simply trying to infuse this weary, old thread with a bit of artificial pizzazz, seing as things are usually so subdued around here. So, everything is green, honestly, and I... but wait, what's that?

 

...but remember K11 has been taking it further than the minimum necessary by doing his own textures (which have their quirks) and other...

 

Oh? Really? So now we're talking about textures, eh?

 

 

I'm as insecure and self-critical as the next man when it comes down to my own textures. I'm not going to ask for a vote on them and I will use what I deem to be appropriate, but deep down I'm not as cocky as I may seem. Textures are something deeply personal, almost private. Diss another man's textures and you're dissing the man himself. So when shimonko points out that my textures have quirks, all I can say is: "Good! I bloody want them to!"

I shall expand on this after you've stared at this little capture of my CF rough texture on the right and semi-ropugh on the left of the image (those who want the full screen detailled view, go via my Photobucket)

 

 

We used to make slightly snide remarks on these Forums about the "generic" PP Look in their early works - no matter which course, the golfing parts always looked the same. We now, rightfully so, make jokes about the generic TGC look of idealized gaudy green ribbons looking always the same. Say what you will about my textures, but they do not look like the same.

Textures are crazy-important! I'm not claiming mine are crazy-awesome, but I believe that they are the singlemost important customization measure a virtual course designer has at his disposal. In the game, they will surround the player at all times and quite often cover 50% of everything he sees, and almost 100% of the part of the screen to which his attention, while playing will focus. They are the main medium for the desginer to communicate with the players on his course and to tell him about the character and the feel of the place. 

Semi-rough on the left, fairway on the right of image:

 

 

Lacking any sort of choice in existing playing surface textures - bar the default textures and shaders provided with the CF (the generic collection) - I had to go and look for new textures myself through the usual channels (Google images, Unity asset store, Turbosquid freeware) and, finding none that suited my taste or that were free to use, ended up making them myself. And getting these textures more or less right took some time and effort.

I applied the following two design principles to those I came up with, keeping in mind that my course was a small, local and rural golf course not patronized by masses of golf tourists, but instead a small and modest "hidden gem" kind of layout. But first, this: My green texture in all its quirkily questionable non-splendor.

 

 

Principle Nr. 1 - Grunginess!

No perfection allowed! Perfection is inhuman, perfection is an impossible absolute, perfection is a computer age sin! I'm aware of the fact that PerfectParallel sports perfection in their company name and has declared it to be their aim, but in this respect I must part company with them: Perfection is not a worthy goal for me. TGC fairways are perfect. And because of that they look boring, predictable and unrealistic. I want blotches and patches and irregularities and imperfections to riddle my textures. I want them to feel hand-made and different - grungy, noisy, perfectly imperfect.

 

Principle Nr. 2 - No mow lines!

Ah yes, we've all seen those fancy patterns and mow lines created by advanced machinery. Personal taste: I don't like them. That is also due to the fact that CF doesn't let us control the exact running of mow lines. Note how on some holes you'll see they have a weirdly random, unnatural angle vis-à-vis the layout of a hole. That's because we can't rotate a texture in order to make its geometric patterns fit the required position. For Willow Heath, a poor and rural course, it would be utterly pretentious and wrong to sport fairways and greens with mow lines and patterns you normally would associate with the perfectly manicured PGA courses like Muirfield Village and others. It would be an unforgivable cultural faux-pas to have an UK countryside course texturized thusly.

Foreground: Unity rough texture (coarse), designed to transition with CF rough texture.

 

 

Creating good textures is a very advanced skill and special brew of alchemy. I won't even pretend that I have even begun to scratch the surface of this dark art. I may know and feel that texture-craft is uniquely vital for golf course design but quite possibly lack the nous and the tastefulness to do something about it. 

Oh alright, this is getting too deep. Here's another fart joke...

 

 

Lovely. Time to wrap this up, without going into details about the terrain textures outside the CF meshes. Quirky is good, that's what I think. Anything that is not bland, homogeneous, perfect, regular, average is fine by me. Considering all of the above, you may feel free to discuss the quality of my textures. But be warned that if you do, I'm going to critique yours in the future if they are not quirky enough.

 

[Brucey Mc]

Lovely textures k11! 👍

[BladeUK]

I'd call your textures 'natural'. It's the perfect textures that are unnatural.

 

 

Dave.

[Volker]

Your work and your interesting posts keep me up to this game. Very fine work, thanks!

[mk1978]

This is pretty much my first post in this forum but I have been following Course Forge discussion with great interest for long time.

I could not agree more with K11 comments about textures. Also, I have to say that those textures are just amazing!

I have been struggling to create textures for quite some time and it seems to be never ending story. Also, it seems that there is no decent textures available to buy. Some textures may look good but as soon as you move far away you start seeing seams etc. Hopefully there will be more people showing their creations because you can get great ideas when seeing textures like in K11's examples.

 

Here is what I have achieved with my golf course so far.

 

https://vimeo.com/83965567

https://vimeo.com/83965660

 

 

[Ted_Ball]

Well that looks wonderful mk1978. Great work.

Course creation is obviously in very talented hands. 

[yesrushdt]

Thanks for sharing K11 and mk1978.  Looking very nice indeed.

[olazaboll]

Nice vids mk1978 ..... 

@ K11 .... In the top view of your course (page 26) I can't really make the 16th to fit in to be "The Benny" ... as you posted pictures of a few pages back......

Were some holes "smoked" and totally redesigned due to the 10 % bug ?

[Kablammo11]

Great stuff, mk1978. Looking good! Is that a fictional or a real course you've shown us? Feels real at first sight.

Your own textures are good and absolutely acceptable, I'd say - though it's hard to evaluate them when you give your fly-bys such a high altitude. They do look a bit PP-generic - not to mention my own, irrational pet peeve about mow lines - but that need not be a bad thing: It may be a bit of a generic look, but it's also a good one, several lightyears ahead of the one of that other game currently in the pipeline...

There are lots upon lots of online tutorials on how to produce seamless textures with Photoshop yourself. Producing them is not hard, since I somehow managed to do it, but they are very unpredictable. What looks good in Photoshop may still fail in Unity. 

 

Also, let me try something, not sure if it works.

CLICK HERE

 

...to get a zip file called the "K11 Willow Heath Pack". It contains 2 folders, one with my CF Library textures and shaders, the other with my terrain engine textures and normal maps (filenames with BUMP in them indicate the normal maps). In them you will find everything and more that I used for my project. You will not find, however, the tiling sizes I used, so proceed with caution and be ready to go for a bit of trial and error. Of course, you need not use any of them at all, I would understand: Textures are something very private and personal and I would hate to impose them on anybody.

I could export them as a unitypackage, too, I guess, but I prefer normal folders to dedicated app files. I dislike the latter a lot, actually. I'm a Mac User, so I hope unzipping works okay for you. Let me know if it doesn't.

[Kablammo11]

Nice vids mk1978 ..... 

@ K11 .... In the top view of your course (page 26) I can't really make the 16th to fit in to be "The Benny" ... as you posted pictures of a few pages back......

Were some holes "smoked" and totally redesigned due to the 10 % bug ?

 

Very observant, Ola. Yes, the Benny is still the Benny, now a 280yd steeply uphill par 4, but angling right to left instead of previously left to right. This became necessary because I had to move the tees of the next hole, the 17th, some 50 yards back to reach the intended length correcting for the 10% bug. That interfered with the original Benny so that I had to shift the Benny fairway some 25 to 35 yards further to the right, changing the orientation of the hole.

 

Here's how tight the green-to-next-tee situation has become after the revamp:

 

 

A left to right Benny would have encroached on the adjoining tee zones too much - and I had almost no wiggle room for these, so that I had two swing it the other way.

I would have had to make alteration to this hole anyway, because when I returned to stretch the course to compensate for the 10% bug, I previously had played and tested it in the pre-alpha version of the game - and that play time provided my with a lot of additional problem areas that needed tweaking or changing. The fairway of the old Benny was one such area - it was so steeply uphill in the landing area of the drive that the ball would roll back some 30+ yards and end up many times in a similar position, no matter what shot I tried to hit, funnelled into a small space of even ground some 70 yds short.

So I shortened the hole and designed a more horizontal plateau in front of the green that should not deflect the landing balls down again, leaving players a choice to

• either go for it and carry 255 yds and 55 ft uphill for the green (watch out for that bunker)
• drive green high into the catchment area to the right of the green setting up a pitch
• or select a long iron for a full wedge approach...

 

 

No idea if this will work better. I will have to test play it some more. As far as course design goes, everything is always in flux and the dynamics of development might make dramatic alterations necessary. That's part of the deal and, as far as I'm concerned, par for the course.

 

Another area of dramatic alterations was, for example, the far corner holes of 12 and 13. To strecht 12 into the 490 yds downhill hole I wanted, I coulnd't move the tees and instead had to move the green away. This called for turning a straight hole into a dogleft left, in order to get the distance. The fairway is now 30 yards furhter to the left than it originally was, and the green 60 yds further to the right. And this, of course, had repercussions on the nearby 13 tees...

 

 

...which couldn't be moved too much, so stretching the 13th ffrom 225yds to 250+yards meant constructing a whole new green. It's now a long, long par 3 with the front of the green some 221 yds from the back tee and the back edge some 272 yds long...

 

 

So yeah, there is a bit of a ripple effect, one hole echoing to the next and so on. I could go on, of course, and if nobody stops me, I very well may... but for now, I hope you get the idea: Everything is always connected with everything. 

[Davefevs]

The final pic looks so real. I could see myself choosing iron and wedge....chance of birdie, but (hopefully) no bogey or worse!

[Brucey Mc]

Videos look great mk1978, just curious how you got on the beta team for Courseforge?

[shimonko]

It's hard to definitely tell because of the resolution of the videos, but I'm not seeing anything to suggest Courseforge has been used, Bruce.

[BladeUK]

Looks like Red Chain's "Customplay" to me.

 

Dave.

[Brucey Mc]

Yeah you might be right there shimonko, was looking at the videos on my iPhone, have looked at them on a proper computer now.

[mk1978]

Thanks for nice comments! I have to say that my model has not been created with Course Forge or any other tool for creating golf courses. I have just used Unity Free with some extensions from Unity Asset Store. But, the course is actually a real one.

When talking about textures, my textures are made more for flying camera animations (camera always quite faraway from ground/textures) and therefore, the quality of the textures is not that great when standing on fairway. I haven’t actually used any bumbmaps for the textures because of the earlier comment.  I can post some pictures later so that you can better see my textures in use. Anyway, I am just a hobbyist and I haven’t worked with my model for about 3 months so it may take some time before get it running again. Below are some old pictures from the same model but it is not exactly the same textures and setting than in the video.

K11, I will also try how my course looks with your textures. Hopefully I understood correct that I can test your textures? I will really need to study your green texture because that is the texture that I am not happy at all with my textures.

 

 

 

 

[Keith]

Absolutely amazing stuff mk1978.  Blows me away that you did that w/out CF.