2551 replies to this topic

[Kablammo11]

And it's that time of the (stunted and disrupted) workflow again: Stuff appearing on the premises. The Blammocorp line of autumn tee zone trimmings...

 

Bucket, washer and bench:

 

 

fences: triple length, single length and single end pole:

 

 

New: line of play marker for those hard to find greens in the distance (lots of them)

 

 

Karen: It's a special place...

 

 

 

Massive déjà-vu. I'm so bored... 

 

[Dazmaniac]

It appears you have repeated the same image URL 3 times........... unless that was the intention.

 

Can I ask, what 3D modelling software you use to create your models?

[NoPutt]

Yes,it seems K11's boredom brought about
the dreaded triple URL syndrome, I'm sure he will
collect and correct himself after a good autumn
nights sleep.

I am fairly sure that AC3D.com is one program
used. It's free for a couple of weeks,but
well worth the nominal price.

[TimBoch]

I think the grass is going to die under the ballwasher and trash bin. That or the maintenance guy is going to have a hernia trying to move them. 

[highfade]

Don't want to turn this into a tech thread but it's official, I like SpeedTree. It's not photo realistic but even with the blobs in the distance, my brain tells me, those are trees.

 

K11, your links plants are great but it seems that Tree Creator plants don't play too nice with late or early low setting sunlight. With the sun behind it loses definition and appear very light. Can you redo them all but this time in SpeedTree, please.     RUN!!

 

Bad planting for example purpose:

 

Otherwise looks splendid. 

 

[Dazmaniac]

Looks good G, glad you're enjoying the GNCD.

 

Not much use as a 'Show and Tell' for future playing in PG though, lol.

 

[Kablammo11]

Sorry about the triple further above, guys. Post 1561 as been edited and now shows the correct images

 

Daz, as NoPutt said I am using a modelling software called AC3D. It's not the best there is, not the only one. I just happen to feel very comfortable with it. That matters more to me than sheer 3D street cred or fancy names. It makes no difference which software you use for modelling, there is ample choice.

 

Highfade: Nothing wrong with you officially liking speed trees. Fear no consequences for yourself - and those 200 kittens had it coming to them anyway. I can confirm similar backlight disenchantments with my models. Most likely this is something I did not do right or overlooked while setting the AO. I suspect that if you reduce the AO, the way I did, this happens. Also, there is a long list of online complaints to Unity about that same phenomenon. I'm at a loss at to what to do about this and in the meantime can only affirm that those gorse bushes behind the green in the 1st image do in fact look fabulous. I did these? Wowww...

Feel free to use my bark and leaf materials and base textures when you import them into your Speed Tree Editor for 19.95 $ a month and try to reproduce them there yourself. Good luck!

 

Griz, thanks for your pix from the other side. I think it's important to look beyond the garden fence every now and then and see what else there is, without having to take sides. And your course looks good. I always have to grin when I see how over at TGC they have a huge off-topic thread about PG, whereas we, over here, seem to have nothing at all to say about them... Personally, I am not at all involved with or interested in that game, since the makers, in their limited wisdom, decided not to make a Mac version. And that, I'm afraid, earned them the K11 seal of disapproval.

[NoPutt]

I assume this is some type of hole signage? (pictured)

Love the bench, very nice, and the fence is nice too.

IMO, which doesn't count much, I think the bin and washer

would look better without the stone base.

 

[Kablammo11]

Don't want to turn this into a tech thread but it's official, I like SpeedTree. It's not photo realistic but even with the blobs in the distance, my brain tells me, those are trees.

K11, your links plants are great but it seems that Tree Creator plants don't play too nice with late or early low setting sunlight. With the sun behind it loses definition and appear very light. 

 

 

Never trust your brain, highfade. My gut tells me your brain is being an idiot.

Still, yes, you are absolutely right: Those experimental bushes and trees of mine are technically inferior. These here aren't (as much):

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/r9ixyuj1g9xlvc6/k11-linkspack3.unitypackage?dl=0

 

Because, bitter tear pouring down my cheeks, I rushed into the Blammocorp! Test Lab to undo the wrong inflicted upon you and get to the bottom of this irksome issue. Here's what's new with the new batch: Left is old, right is new:

 

 

Allow me to expand a little on that. Several settings on my end were quite out of order. You could easily have corrected them yourself, btw, by simply changing the settings in the prefab the way they are altered between the first (old and bad) to the second (new and improved) picture that follows:

 

 

Here's the text version of the above: I upped LOD and AO Density back to max - I had kept the former low to economize on tris and the latter to avoid the stark black effect when backlit. That was wrong, it turns out.

What helped most was me changing the translucency color from very bright to very dark - Immediately those distant gleamy trees turned a lot darker. Further changes with the Trans. View Dep. and the shadow strength also helped.

 

As a result, all those vegetables now look nice and shady when looked at against the sun:

 

 

There's a bit of a down side, as they also look a bit darker when looked at with the sun in your back. But that is acceptable, imo.

 

 

Whatever your reservations may be, highfade, the "too bright" issue is not endemic to Unity trees overall, but merely a manifestation of me applying the oldest strategy there is when faced with incomprehensible challenges: Trial and error.

 

Delete the old package, import the new one, drag the prefabs into the proper orphan slots in your tree gallery, perhaps press "Refresh". As a bonus, there's two more volume shrubs, a hardy coastal Juniper pine tree and an unfinished Juniper bush growth in there as well.

Thank you for choosing Blammocorp!, the truly caring company that will not quit on you until you are completely happy, clinically demented, suffering from amnesia or dead.

[Kablammo11]

I assume this is some type of hole signage? (pictured)

Love the bench, very nice, and the fence is nice too.

IMO, which doesn't count much, I think the bin and washer

would look better without the stone base.

 

You are right, your opinion does not count much, but enough for me to revisit the bin and washer. Their base looks a bit needlessly heavy and that is totally not "Karen" in essence, so it will be dealt with. Thank you very much for catching my "Inner Bastard" red-handed.

 

Regarding the target of your blue arrow, it is in fact... ...a target. I haven't decided yet if I am going to use it or not, but it is there to act as a second-tier aiming help at problem spots on the course, where the marker behind the green might be obstructed from view. Like here, on the 11th, where a blind 2nd shot with a wedge would have to carry some dunes and find a green nestled at the bottom of a valley far below.

 

 

Not realistic? Holes 5 and 6 on Lahinch old course say it is!

[NoPutt]

I see now,thanks. 

Put a target on something in South Carolina

and fairly soon it will be full of holes, no matter

where the target is located. They need a licence

to hunt game, but it seems to be open season

on Stop Signs.

[highfade]

Thanks for the updated package from Blammocorp.

 

Personally I'm more of a "Starter Pack",  "Out of the Box",  "Plug & Play" type of guy. So, if something isn't quite right and I need to fiddle with settings it usually ends bad...

 

Whenever I try to change AO or whatever setting in the tree creator there is a spinning updating circle and then this happens. It changes the diffuse.png to a pale washed-out texture and nothing else but re-importing can fix it.  I don't want to burden you any more with this but just thought you should know.

 

[Kablammo11]

Maybe we're on different Unity versions... I'm still on 5.0.2 because (Harrumph!) that's the only one I can get a working CF on. Or some lighting settings. So much can go kerplonk without us ever understanding why.

Just to be clear, you need to manually drag the prefab into the scene to create a game object and make some changes to it, and then, when you are done, grab that same game-object in your hierarchy view and drag and drop it over the prefab in your assets to make sure your changes are being applied to it and to all the already planted trees of that kind.

Rule of thumb: You'll know your dealing with a game object IF you see it has a collision circle around the foliage. See images 2 and 3 in post 1659

 

I'm all for starter packs and neat boxes myself. But the tree box is oh so empty... I'd love to have oodles of phenomenal plants exactly fitting my needs and the fictitious climate zone my course is set in. But I don't and it'll have to be either the bland, clumpy substandard fare - or my hopelessly clueless DIY. You decide where you draw the line - Myself, I have grudgingly concluded that the vegetation is a (nasty and tedious) part of my design remit, too important a key element to be left to chance or the luck of the draw - and that, no, any old accidental tree will never serve the overall creation as well as those that I tried to make (clumsily) myself. There is no artistic ambition or vanity behind my creations - they are an act of sheer desperation.

[Trath]

Keep up the great work guys ... we all appreciate it! Vegatation is critical to the overall look and feel of the course and I'm sure that there is a lot of improvement potential over existing courses in many areas.

 

I hope that you figure it out.

 

Accomodation, butler services and beer still on the table

 

www.bydnandbnb.co.za

[highfade]

Maybe we're on different Unity versions... I'm still on 5.0.2 because (Harrumph!) that's the only one I can get a working CF on. Or some lighting settings. So much can go kerplonk without us ever understanding why.

Just to be clear, you need to manually drag the prefab into the scene to create a game object and make some changes to it, and then, when you are done, grab that same game-object in your hierarchy view and drag and drop it over the prefab in your assets to make sure your changes are being applied to it and to all the already planted trees of that kind.

Rule of thumb: You'll know your dealing with a game object IF you see it has a collision circle around the foliage. See images 2 and 3 in post 1659

 

I'm all for starter packs and neat boxes myself. But the tree box is oh so empty... I'd love to have oodles of phenomenal plants exactly fitting my needs and the fictitious climate zone my course is set in. But I don't and it'll have to be either the bland, clumpy substandard fare - or my hopelessly clueless DIY. You decide where you draw the line - Myself, I have grudgingly concluded that the vegetation is a (nasty and tedious) part of my design remit, too important a key element to be left to chance or the luck of the draw - and that, no, any old accidental tree will never serve the overall creation as well as those that I tried to make (clumsily) myself. There is no artistic ambition or vanity behind my creations - they are an act of sheer desperation.

 

Aaaah, that might be the problem, I only have prefabs in my folder and made some changes to that. I don't have no tree model with collision circle?

[Kablammo11]

You ought to, you just habe to conjure the model up first. Just click on one of the prefabs, then physically drag them into your scene and drop them.

As for their location, go into the Ambient Occlusion folder that came with my pack, then open the folders Gorse, Heather, Juniper, Rumex or Volume Shrubs. In there are the prefabs you should use, not those inside the numerous Tree1 to 14 folders that Unity automatically created to store stupid things in them. 

Honestly, who designs this crap? Have they been fired? Why not? Are they still allowed to breathe? Why?

 

Perhaps also look at Mikes collision tut in the private sector, he does exactly that in there as well.

[Kablammo11]

And the fun continues: Bin and washer, as correctly singled out by our good friend NoPutt, in a slightly better shape as per today:

 

 

Apologies for the green stuff below that looks like deep frozen spinach - There's nothing I can do about it atm, I'm starting to smell a conspiracy behind this mythical update that was coming in a week or so - six weeks ago. But for this undeniable visual improvement due to your contribution, pardner, thank you again for bringing this to my attention - kindly accept this tiny little token of appreciation.

 

[NoPutt]

Ahhh, the bin and washer look much more Karenesque,very nice.

Thanks for the croakers, haven't had fried legs in ages.

Now back to Show and Tell, 

If you're looking for gold at Dry Gulch Golf Club,

"The hand points the way", and if you find it, don't

forget to do the Walter Houston dance from the movie, 

"Treasure of the Sierra Madre".

[highfade]

Okay, that was a struggle but found the problem.

 

If you touch anything in the tree creator it optimizes the textures. You must turn off "fog" before doing so otherwise you'll get the washed-out leaves. Thanks google and K11

[Kablammo11]

Meantime, Ben Cartwright and Little Joe are visiting a brothel in Virginia City, mistakenly believing it to be a cattle auction. Back at the ranch,  Hoss and Hop Sing at trying out a new chilli con carne recipe, with hilarious but rather messy consequences. And Adam, as usual, isn't there.

 

Over at Karen, the bushy season is nearing it's end, with all the major planting completed:

 

 

And yes, I threw in a lighthouse. Bushy hotspots are, for instance, the gully down the 1st fairway and up to the green.

 

 

The high ground including the 8th hole and the 9th and 5th tees:

 

 

The darling little par 3 7th, 140yds from the back tees

 

 

The 17th, with trees all the way down the right (Players using drivers must hit the bottleneck between bunker and trees)

 

 

The dune green nestled inside a vale on 11

 

 

And the upper half of 18 with the club house area.

 

 

There will, however, be a lot of holes without major plants, mainly those right at the shore who are exposed to the elements, like 5 and 6:

 

 

Or many of the back nine, including 10, 12, 13, 14 and 15. You're looking at 13 in the foreground.

 

 

A lot of the transitions from land to water need to be handmade. Note, for instance, the beach in the back at 14 where I got a very nice effect of waves rolling into and over a sandy beach. On this one, I don't want to tuck the ocean away behind and below cliffs and rocks, but want the waves to lap right at the edge of some golf holes.