22 replies to this topic

[Buck]

I'm not a course designer and have no access to CF anyhow, but I wanted to inquire with the experts in here about the bunker edges...

 

Is there anything that can be done to give them a more realistic look?

Some variation in width, coloration, height above the adjacent sand as appropriate, etc?

 

Does anyone know what I mean?

 

The current edges really seem to have the appearance of just being a vector shape + a texture that's expanded slightly beyond the size/shape of the sand element (or vice versa)

 

Thank you for anything that will help me gain some clarity here!

[IanD]

There are variables that can be used surrounding the edges of most shapes. You may have seen K11's edging of some fairways a few weeks back.... those can apply to anything created. You can make a path using the CF, within the fairway and have it run along the fairway, and edge it like a kerb on a pavement. How it appears visually.. well that is the variable all the Designers are trying to create.

 

There is a seam blend too, and that distance is variable...so the larger the blend, the more other things are reduced. There is likely improvements to be had over time in this area though... pot bunkers etc, and this would seriously change some of the concepts regarding lips.

[IanK]

Personally I think the bunker lips look very good.

[Kablammo11]

The fact remains, even with all the variables fine-tuned, that the bunker edges ALWAYS and UNIFORMLY apply to a bunker: They are of the same depth, slope and blend 360 degrees around a bunker.

One possible solution might be to clone the bunker mesh several times over, 3, 4, 10 times, for designers to get different types of bunkers with different lid depth and steepness, so that at least neighbouring bunkers can be made to look different. But even these would be limited because they would have the same lid depth, lid angle and blend width all around them.

A pot bunker that is cut out and vertically extruded from the terrain, with a steep face in front and a shallow end at the back, can not be designed with the tools included in CF. And that is that, period. There are ways to cheat a tiny bit, but the cheat, imo, makes things look worse than the honest admission that we can't do it properly.

 

I assure you that the devs are aware of this, and that Mike as a our designer-in-chief desperately wants to fix this. However, this long-lasting pot bunker tragedy is not an urgent priority for the game at all. Pot bunkers and some-such CF niceties are at the very back of a very long queue of desired improvements: Fundamentals first, basics later, cosmetics last. 

[Buck]

Personally I think the bunker lips look very good.

 

I don't know Ian - If you look at a bunch of real photos of something like the Bandon courses that RobC has made and then compare to the in game bunker edges - it's pretty apparent how much improvement PG could use in this area.  Just so much variety in size/shape/coloration/depth (just of the edges!)

 

[Buck]

@K11:  Thx - Good to hear it's on the radar at least.

 

With the devs being such "golf guys", I'm sure they aren't pleased yet with the bunker situation in most cases.

[IanK]

I must admit, I've never played on any course with bunkers like the ones pictured above.

[Buck]

@IanK:  I think this first line (below) from K11 highlights my main frustration...   Hopefully they figure something out down the line.

 

The fact remains, even with all the variables fine-tuned, that the bunker edges ALWAYS and UNIFORMLY apply to a bunker: They are of the same depth, slope and blend 360 degrees around a bunker.

[Dazmaniac]

Pot bunkers.

These are something else Mike wants to revisit in the future as with current CF it is not possible to create realistic looking pot bunkers.

Gary N did a great job at Wells Hollows, but compare some of the old pot bunkers even Mike created on his courses in Links 2003 and you can see CF has some work needed.

[Birdie]

Yes, these APCD bunker lips from MJ and Doc Rob... Hmmm, i also miss these beauties!!

[mcthommo]

you had to mention the P.B didn't you- just think of the feline destruction that will soon occur, eh K11?!  

[Kablammo11]

I did not need Daz's explicit naming to spot the obvious connection, mcthommo. 

 

Seeing Bucks fine images, there is one more limiting factor that designers and players need to be aware of: Detail resolution. Meaning that at some spots on a real golf course (and everywhere else), there is something different happening every next inch: Dirt, different grass etc... For reasons of performance it is simply not possible to achieve a similar density in Unity (Yes, Unity: Course Forge is not to blame).

On an Unity Terrain, everything is tied to a grid, the terrain mesh, which is some 3 feet wide between verts in most cases. That grid rules everything and acts as a magnet for the painting and planting brushes. And that means that planting and detail work can never be as lush and inch-precise as real life. Unity lacks the inherent precision for that - and your PC the immense processing power required for roughly 20 to 50 times more visual information.

Play your ball anywhere into the deep grass on PG and look closely: You will see pixels floating weirdly anywhere and the illusion of reality falls apart. Quite often your brain has made a deal with your eyes to look past this - voluntary suspension of disbelief. But it's there for all to see who want to see it. Not much can be done about that.

Praise reality: It can assault us with countless Terabytes of visual information in glorious detail - but on a virtual golf course we have mere Megabytes or less at our disposal to clumsily mimic real life.

 

 

[klapauzius]

On an Unity Terrain, everything is tied to a grid, the terrain mesh, which is some 3 feet wide between verts in most cases. That grid rules everything and acts as a magnet for the painting and planting brushes. And that means that planting and detail work can never be as lush and inch-precise as real life. Unity lacks the inherent precision for that - and your PC the immense processing power required for roughly 20 to 50 times more visual information.
 

I'm not familiar with Unity, but wouldn't it be possible to have a finer mesh grid on a couple of select spots in the course that the player is bound to see more often (like the bunker regions for example) and inject a greater level of detail there?

[Kablammo11]

That's exactly what CF is doing, klapauzius. It transcends the terrain grid and allows for much more precise shapes. The bunker lids are such a place: CF adds vertex points with a lot more precision, creating the slopes and tiny dimensions. This can only achieved though, because a CF mesh is not part of the terrain proper: It's an additional 3D mesh that is created on purpose and floating on top of it. But CF only deals with ground meshes.

 

Unity terrains can not be customised to add more grid points where they should and subtract others where they are not needed. Would sure be nice...  Their grid is symmetrical across the board and always rigid, except in the vertical axis. And planting grasses and painting terrain textures outside of the golf meshes, though, is subject to to this terrain grid. This usually measures 2049 by 2049 grid points - for a golf plot of about 1700 meters that translates to to a single terrain point every 82 cms.

Now it could be thinkable to raise the terrain resolution to 4097, even 8193 grid points. But that would mean 4 or 16 even times more gridpoints. 16 respectively 64 mio polygons instead of just 4. And today's PC's could not handle that volume of data.

 

Anyway, my point is that maybe not in all but in certain respects, translating reality into virtual space is a bit like making a copy of the Mona Lise...  with an etch-a-sketch. Nature of the beast...

[olazaboll]

For not beeing able to add pot bunkers ATM, I think Gary made a great job on Wells Hollow ...

[Mike Jones]

Basically there are a few limitations but let me say this - the current designers have nowhere near pushed the boundaries of what's possible with CF bunkers apart from the possible exception of Gary on Well's Hollows.

[RobC]

Show us then Mike :-)

[Mike Jones]

Well a nice halfway house are the bunkers in the rough at Woody's practice range. Certainly a lot closer to the Bandon type bunkers that Buck is describing. There are other things such as terrain overlay texture merging and more splines for additional texture work that can be added if you have the inclination.

 

What CF can't currently do is move individual verts to create variations in lip depth. It's something we will probably be able to add procedurally in the future so people don't have to spend hours on each bunker like they did with APCD to get a good result.

[RobC]

Tha'ts pretty much what I 'tried' to do on Bandon Trails anyway

[uvmnick]

I've been practicing bunker creation in Unity, and there seems to be a couple things I am still trying to figure out.

 

1) I'm not able to create any lips, as seen in RobC's most recent Bandon Dune image above. Is this created in CF? 

 

2) For the most part, my bunkers in Unity are basic shapes. I haven't figured out how to create the various sharp curves that a bunker can have (as seen in the Bandon Dune pic above). Is this created in CF? 

 

I'm just starting my journey with Unity. I've watched the Unity3d Environmental Series, as well as some of Unity 5-From Beginner to Pro. If this sculpting is done in Unity, is there a good tutorial available that discusses this? Or is there a feature I'm overlooking when creating the shapes?

 

I'd post pics of what I've done, but I'm at work now. Shhh....