26 replies to this topic

[Adam T1]

I had some questions about course boundaries and what would be visible. There is one part of my course built into the side of a hill that has a natural boundary blocking the edge of the terrain from the player's line of sight. For the rest of it, do I need to consider adding something similar? Does Unity naturally take care of this, or would a thick forest be enough to do the trick? I know there is a limit to how far you can see in the highest detail, but does that pertain to overall distance that one can see when playing the course in the game? Thought of this and wanted to find an answer before finishing up sculpting the remaining 10 holes, as it may or may not influence the design.

[shimonko]

In Shimonkourse because of the elevations on the course, I use a mixture of a 2D panorama as a skybox for the far background and some extra terrains surrounding the main terrain for the near background. But being a real course, I don't have the flexibility of changing the design to suit.

 

The easiest solution is to have a skybox, with trees hiding the transition from course to skybox. It doesn't have to be a thick forest. You have to consider what a hole fly-by and the ball cam might see.

 

K11's course is more along your lines and he has played with the flyby cameras (and I think has seen ball cam view on it).

[Adam T1]

I don't know what you mean by skybox.......perhaps this is something important to learn? I have not experimented with using multiple terrains yet either, just been sculpting away with the hope of having something I can start laying CF textures on in the future...

 

 

I actually have another question. Can I work on Unity 4 projects in Unity 5 without any issue? Also, I have had to smooth after sculpting terrain to get the artificial "rings" to go away. Am I using the wrong brushes? Based on Mike Jones' course forge par 3 creation video, I don't see any ring bumps that need to be smoothed out...is this something that was improved for Unity 5? Getting rid of these "rings" would probably double or triple my current rate of progress. 

[shimonko]

You'll only get rings or terracing if your raw heightmap file is wrong (or possibly import it incorrectly). I'm unaware of anyone else having ring problems and having to smooth them out. Post a screenshot of your raw file if you like.

 

Unity 5 hasn't been released yet. Version 4.6 only went into public beta yesterday. I highly doubt CF will work in 4.6 as the GUI system has completely changed. Even version 4.5 some of us noticed some strange happenings so we went back to 4.3.4, which is from memory the version Mike said they're developing for.
 

I wouldn't muck around with multiple terrains yet if skybox is a new word. Until we can see our courses in PG, we have no idea what it feasible, too heavy, or overkill. Have a read on skyboxes and see if you can download a free one from somewhere.

[Kablammo11]

A skybox is basically a pre-fabricated sky with clouds that you can add to your project. There are several skyboxes included in Unity. Or you could create and import a self-made one yourself.

To make the boundary of your terrain less square and conspicuous, you can also:

1. Add a 360 panorama showing some landscape in the distance
2. Create additional very low res terrain to place around your golf course
3. Raise the outer parts of your terrain to block out the view to the outside (the funnel method)
4. And of course plant very dense forests to also obstruct any vista towards the exterior

As you progress, I suppose that you will find that a combination of all 4 works best. But you will have to "work" for it, there is no easy one-button magic wand that will get rid of this problem automatically.

 

The "rings" could also be a result of a very large brush on a low res terrain. Recommended CF terrain resolution is 2049 by 2049. Please post a screen cap and I'm sure that between the two of us, shimonko and I (with him being the favourite) should be able to pinpoint the cause of this phenomenon and recommend corrective action to you.

[Adam T1]

I think you're on to something, K11, but I'm not sure. Anyways, have a look at the settings in these photos. I'll read up on skyboxes too.

 

[Kablammo11]

Thank you, Adam. The rings in image 1 are pretty typical for terrain brush 9 (1st in 2nd row on your image). I use that one a lot to do major excavations, because its ripples (or rings) add a bit of elevation noise and the amount of the digging is easier to take in than from a uniform brush. (I actually call that one "the excavator"). Are you saying that this was NOT created by this brush? If not, then I'm stuped - but I'm quite adamant that this typical worm-poo pattern is distinctly connected to that brush. 

Did this occur just once or several times? If once, perhaps you misclicked on the brush selection fields, trying to load brush 1 and ending up with 9 instead...?

 

In Unity, go to Edit > Render Settings. In the inspector window, to the right, you will find a little field that says Skybox. Click on the small dot to the right of it and another window will open with a selection of textures, among them a few skyboxes. Click the one you like. Done. (There's also a short video sequence about this in one of MJ's old, old "how to prep your course" tuts on site)

 

Your terrain settings look okay, so far. You might want to reduce the Pixel Error value to 1, otherwise your terrain will be rendered more sloppily over increasing distance. Regarding trees, you might want to fiddle with Billboard Start distance and Fade Length once you start planting them. You'll see what works best later, too soon for now.

[Adam T1]

I have used almost exclusively the highlighted brush, which I would think is brush 1...could this be related to using a 1024 detail resolution? Can I lower the pixel error without messing things up? Also, I see that detail distance is set to 80, which would probably explain the early cutoff on the high detail area displayed. 

[Kablammo11]

1: no  

2: yes, no problem    

3: no. Detail Distance only matters for planted vegetation

 

Have you read this already?

 

Next time out there, try to apply brush 9 (shifted, for digging down) and see for yourself if that looks familiar.

[Adam T1]

Brush 9 is pretty cool actually! But there is no way that's what I was using. I have an image that was made using brush 1 right here....

BTW I have NOT seen that page before. I'll have to look through more of the other stuff to learn more.

 

P.S. Shimonko, I did NOT use a starting heightmap for this course, I carved everything so far from a flat terrain.

[Kablammo11]

Okay, I'm stumped. If brush 1 did this, then I don't know how or why - only that it shouldn't do it in the first place.

I see nothing in your terrain settings that would explain it. Sorry, out of ideas.

 

Btw (not related), why set your terrain width and length to exactly 1545.366 meters? Bit of an odd value...

[Adam T1]

The reason for the odd value was to set my photoshop image to (hopefully) the exact desired scale. I then added some extra space around the edges...but now that you mention that, I cannot recall the calculations I made for the scale because I did that months ago. I hope I did it correctly.........I do wonder if I made it too large and forgot to factor out the extra added space around the perimeter...if so, how hard is it to change the image scale?

 

No idea why my brush does that. All I know is my version of Unity is 4.3.4f1

 

It keeps telling me that some version of 4.5 is available. No idea if that would fix the ring issue or, based on what shimonko said earlier, would not be compatible with CF and PP.

[shimonko]

P.S. Shimonko, I did NOT use a starting heightmap for this course, I carved everything so far from a flat terrain.

Wow. Are you saying with brush #1 you click on flat piece of terrain and rather than a smooth hill you're getting those ripples?

You're using the right version, 4.3.4f1, and your terrain settings are not an issue. Feasibly could be a graphics driver or directX issue. I doubt installing 4.5 would help as others would be seeing the same problem in 4.3.4f1, but it could fix something oorrupted.

On your terrain settings, export your raw file at 16 bit Mac, open in Photoshop (set width, height as 2049, channel count 1, 16 bit Mac) and it'll probably be very dark because your 600 terrain height is very big, but you should be able to see if there's banding or not. If there's not, it's likely you have a driver issue.

[Adam T1]

Yes, I am getting that with brush #1. It means that every so often I need to stop and smooth everything, which eats up about twice as much time as sculpting the terrain does. I don't think it's a GPU driver issue, and although it is DX11 compatible it is a workstation GPU, so Unity likely isn't its strength. I actually had to update the GPU driver at one point figuring out some other technical issues, but I can't remember if that was after I had started fooling around with Unity or not.

Just wondering, since I'm on a Windows machine, what is the difference between windows and mac byte order? The "mac" one works fine on my computer.

 

Here's the heightmap, very dark but looks ok. I'm not sure what you mean by "banding" if that's the rings or not, but they shouldn't be there because whenever I finish doing some sculpting I meticulously smooth everything.

 

For the future, is max terrain height something I can lower during a project if the new max would still fall well above actual heights? For example, I doubt I will have anything above 85m, so lowering it to 100 would maybe be nice, as long as it wouldn't mess thing up.

[shimonko]

Byte order is just the way numbers are stored internally and nothing you need to worry about apart from making sure if you export in one format, you import the same format. 
 
Looking at your height map, I can see the ripples you're getting, so you can rule out driver issues. They're the little dark squiggly lines. Again this is suggestive of exporting in Windows format, importing in Mac, or vice-versa. But if you haven't imported anything, I'm at a loss.

 

Your terrain height of 600 means your unsculpted course surrounds are a good 100m off the ground. Unless you did a 'flatten' to 100m, again this looks like a Windows/Mac mismatch. 

 

Try creating another terrain in the same scene (just moving it away from the other one) and sculpting it with the same brush to see if you still get rippling.

[shimonko]

For the future, is max terrain height something I can lower during a project if the new max would still fall well above actual heights? For example, I doubt I will have anything above 85m, so lowering it to 100 would maybe be nice, as long as it wouldn't mess thing up.

 

If you lowered your terrain height from 600 to 100, all your hills would also reduce in height to a sixth of their previous heights.

 

You'd have to export your heightmap into Photoshop, add a new layer above it, fill it with 16% grey (=100/600), set its blend mode to 'divide', then reimport into Unity. Alternatively you may find someone's written a script to do it.

 

But get your terrain problem sorted out first, as it's already 100 odd meters above the ground.

[Adam T1]

I actually started by flattening to 60m to make sure I had enough headroom to avoid hitting 0. Turns out the vast majority of the terrain will be between 40 and 80m. Considering that I flattened to 60m, does it look ok? I will try additional terrains and even a blank project to se if I get the same ring effect when sculpting the terrain. I have not imported anything, as all elevation work was done exclusively in Unity. 

[Adam T1]

Hate to double post, but here are some more pictures of the rings, one in a new terrain in the same project, the other on a new terrain in a new project. Just want to check, does one file comprise an entire Unity project? (for example, shapefiles for GIS/CAD usually comprise 4 or 5 parts, and I don't want to forget anything.)

 

 

I'm thinking of uninstalling and reinstalling Unity. Should I consider trying a different version? But before doing this, I should note that the "rings" only really appear when using low opacity (pretty strongly on 1, much less so on 2, and barely at all on 3). Getting rid of the need to smooth the rings would cut the total amount of time I spend on sculpting by as much as 60-70%........

[shimonko]

I've regularly used an opacity of 1 with no problems on the same version, on Windows. My next suggestion would be to get rid of the zzRuler script just in the off chance it is doing something funny, and post a screen shot with the "texture wireframe" display mode. Or you can zip up the latest fresh project you did and post it somewhere and we can have a look.

 

A Unity project consist of heaps of files, not just a single. Every image, model, script,... is kept separately. Only when the course is built will it be reduced down to main course file with a few smaller additional files.

[Adam T1]

I deleted the zzruler script from Unity, checked to make sure there was no "uninstall" option for it unless it's supposed to be done through Unity. A filesystem search is finding no zzruler files so I'm assuming it's ok, but the rings persist. I believe the only other asset I added was a free one with more tree types. Unless that one has known issues, I would not think the ring problem is asset related.

 

What would it take to zip up a unity project? The little one I started I did not save, but I don't know if you'd want to look at that or the course project.