2551 replies to this topic

[highfade]

Beautiful, can't wait to tee it up.

[Kablammo11]

Well, just trying to nudge this thread towards the 1000 post threshold...

 

Behold the finished Beast:

 

 

And learn the path you will follow to vanquish it:

 

 

Although, if I say "finished", there's still a couple things I want to try...

[Mike Jones]

Insane detail, looking forward to hacking it around!

[NoPutt]

"That's no moon, It's a space station" (Obi Wan)

What a view K, looks menacing, treacherous, and hungry.

[Kablammo11]

Thanks.

Start. With. A. Plan.

 

[Keith]

Looks so close to an authentic, real world aerial view K11.  Awesome stuff. 

[bagofholding]

Just a quick question that I don't think I've seen posted elsewhere, but does CF run inside Unity (as in I have to download Unity to use it) or does it run by itself?

I'd just like to know because if I have to download Unity it'll take a good chunk of hours overnight to do so.  With Frontier High Speed Internet I only download around around 128Kbps if nothing else even looks at my internet connection funny.

 

Also, looking real nice K.  Keep up the good work and I hope we'll get to play that someday soon!

[IanD]

CF currently requires Unity to use. So the answer is yes, but which version of Unity to use is all I can ask another Q of... so be careful in your choice of grabbing Unity 5...

 

At present, CF only works in Unity 4.6 - however, PP know of Unity 5 and further insight will likely be needed from them regarding eventual release.

[bagofholding]

IanD, in the release notes for the patch that is supposed to come out today they mentioned this will likely be the last release using unity 4.x and they will be upgrading to U5.  Part of the reason is that U5 will actually allow us to create the courses and make them work without needing the $1500 pro license that U4 needed.

[Kablammo11]

Correct. I'd go for U5 if I were you, bag. CF will certainly not be be released in a sub-5 version.

[TheOtherRick]

That is some amazing work K11. I aspire to reach such a level of skill. KUTGW.

[highfade]

It's quite hard to make a course with no trees look good and have a sense of place and scale. Black Swan just looks and feels spectacular, can't wait!

[Kablammo11]

That is some amazing work K11. I aspire to reach such a level of skill. KUTGW.

 

Thank you. The level of skill is well within your reach, Rick. The tools are not that complicated.

 

It's quite hard to make a course with no trees look good and have a sense of place and scale. Black Swan just looks and feels spectacular, can't wait!

 

I thought it was liberating to work without trees - though I quite often used rock objects to copy their function as obstructions, scenic embellishments and gap-fillers. I'm not sure that it's quite hard to make a course with no trees - on the contrary: It's too easy to make a course with trees. Trees are always majestic, natural and good. Everybody loves trees. You can't argue with trees: Just smack on of those bloody, holier-than-thou tree bastards in there and the bozos will lap it up until their mouths are glued shut by sap. Who the hell do these trees think they are? Just because they fart out oxygen they now think they own the (SLAP! BACKHAND SLAP!)...  Sorry Mom. Yes, I'll shut up now, Mom.

[TimBoch]

Reminds me of playing a course in Manchester when I was in England for 5 weeks to learn to fly the Avro RJ85.  The holes shared fairways and crisscrossed making you always look for flying golf balls.

[highfade]

Thank you. The level of skill is well within your reach, Rick. The tools are not that complicated.

 

 

I thought it was liberating to work without trees - though I quite often used rock objects to copy their function as obstructions, scenic embellishments and gap-fillers. I'm not sure that it's quite hard to make a course with no trees - on the contrary: It's too easy to make a course with trees. Trees are always majestic, natural and good. Everybody loves trees. You can't argue with trees: Just smack on of those bloody, holier-than-thou tree bastards in there and the bozos will lap it up until their mouths are glued shut by sap. Who the hell do these trees think they are? Just because they fart out oxygen they now think they own the (SLAP! BACKHAND SLAP!)...  Sorry Mom. Yes, I'll shut up now, Mom.

 

Next time I'll just stick to "nice course K11" 

[Kablammo11]

I have agonised for weeks over what follows. Here's the problem - that huge cluster of rocks running along the spine of the course. It looks like a rock giant has taken a dump there. It may look rugged and craggy, yes - but it suffers from the paradox that it is a cluster of big rocks where in fact there should be... drumroll...  a mountain:

 

 

It looks okay (you've just seen one of the better angles). But I decided to replace these many ginormous rocks with one equally, slightly less confusing mountain. Here it is:

 

 

You see the difference: An uncoordinated pile of clunkies vs a smooth and quite elegant, uniform shape.

 

 

Never mind the different colours, that will be dealt with quickly. And on to the task of replacing the stuff in the back with the thing in front.

I asked Tara to send for my armada of invisible choppers and airlift the old stuff up to make room for the new element:

 

 

And then a second armada of invisible cranes and caterpillars began to nudge, stretch, rotate, lift the new mountain into position below:

 

 

Of course, there ensued the usual pensum of terrain sculpting, texture repainting and grass planting. A few of the top rocks were slowly lowered down again to add a bit of profile and cover up tricky transitions. But soon, we had a result:

 

 

I got the mountain that I wanted. Looks rounder and softer, but at least it looks the part: It's a mountain or a big hill, and not just a handful of oversized rocks.

Ever since Mike put his splendid snow peaks around CP I knew that I had to follow suit by planting one such thingamajig smack in the middle of the Black Swan.

But why stop there? Now that I had a working mountain, I proceeded to clone it a few times and alter the horizon around the plot:

 

 

And that is that: We now have mountains around the Swan. A cleaner and hopefully more dramatic skyline in the eternal fog.

 

 

Compared to the previous rocks, it's a bit of a visual simplification, yes. But it does add a bit of grandeur. 

Now I could, instead of using objects, also have added a second, smaller terrain object and painted textures on it - I did that at Willow Heath. I opted against this because of the central mountain, the one I started with. It is in range for players to hit it with a golf ball. And only a 3D object allows for the addition of CF terrain physics. This way, you can smack a driver at the mountain and the ball will bounce of it and come back down.

 

 

Soon finished. All that's left to do is add an ocean.

[NoPutt]

I liked the pile of rubble, but the mountain is better.

Don't forget to have those choppers lower that

igneous mass, I'm sure there is a place for it.

And you can't go wrong with "Purple Haze".

[Mike Jones]

If the 'mountains' were in the distance and further from the course I'd be with you K11, but maybe it's just me but the rocks as they were looked awesome.

[Kablammo11]

I de-awesomed my beautiful swan - into an ugly duckling?

Well, maybe. At this stage I pretty much operate on instinct, and perhaps staring at all those rocks while playing the course made me aware of them as being a bit "in your face" - especially in the player cam of PG, which has a narrower field of view. This tends to make flaws a bit more evident than my images in this post, revealing too many hard, long and straight edges. Such as in the image below, where the low-poly foreground rock really looks too artificial. Which is my bad, I went for low poly objects. But the place lacked roundness and hugeness imo. 

 

 

There's another factor: My images here are all - always almost - lit from the back or the far side: An elementary lighting rule to make things look good. Yes, I do swivel the directional light around to doctor the images I post. But when seen in full light, my rock clusters started to fall apart, visually: Casting shadows that felt wrong and loosing a great deal of 3D charm.

And what with PG's dynamic weather that will pretty much do whatever it wants, that was a flaw that needed addressing.

 

That is not to say I truly  performed an improvement - or its opposite - but only time can tell.

[Choppe]

I have followed the forum for a long time but i don think i have ever posted. I have been just been waiting for the full release of PG so i could get my hands on CF. I finally played PG and immediately decided i wanted to get a jump start on my first course that i will build. I made my master plan and imported it into unity and i have now started shaping. I have only got the first and second hole done but thought i might as well share. I can't wait to start using the CF and getting the course features to look better.   Screen Shot 2015-04-10 at 4.29.19 PM.png   383.19KB   0 downloads