How is this achieved?

Hello Everybody,

It has been quite some time that I haven't been on this board. I am hoping that one of you boys and girls might help me figure out something.

The screenshots below shows a beautiful golf course from the PGA game. I am scratching my head as to how these guys manage to get the fairway and the rough as well the bunkers to be so perfectly roundish and crisp.

Do you think that this is done using Terrain maps?
Or do you think that is done using separate high-poly models for each area of the course (which I suspect).

This actually leads me to my second question... Is there a good tutorial on multitexuring which is specific to the way you can apply it in Blitz3D on terrains?

I would like to use multilayered tilable textures that are selectively shown using alpha maps. After nearly 1 year of fiddling, I still cannot figure out how this is properly done in Blitz3D.

Let's say that I had a layer for each the fairway, the roof and the green. How can I make these layers show-up using black or white images that sit in between to do what can be seen in these screenshots.

Here is another attempt to explain what I am trying to get to. Let's suppose I had three images of a filled circle in 3 different colors. How would I go about mixing them so that I can make a multi-layered dart board?

Any help on this would be grately appreciated.

P.S.: I know that this can be done in 3d/2d packages, and I know as well how. What I need to know however, is how to produce this in Blitz3D without getting wishi washi textures as seen on so many terrains in the creations gallery.

they look lik models to me they seem to sharp/clear to be terrains.

It's simple really. Most of the terrains in the gallery are Blitz terrains with one big texture stretched over them. Even my own terrain system uses rather large areas that have a single texture, to make it easy for the user.

But these screenshots are using custom meshes, with tiled textures.

Look at where the lightest green grass goes into the darker and then the darkest. See the line? Really sharp. That's because that is actually the edges of polygons.

To do this in Blitz, you'll need three seperate grass textures, probably 512x512 for the crosshatch one, but you can use smaller ones that tile more for the others. Plus a smooth sand texture, and a gravely sand texture.

Make one surface for each texture in your mesh, and then model each region for each texture. So your sand trap would be a smooth oval.

It would probably be easiest to do this as follows. Make a large grid to represent the whole course. Deform it with your heightmap. Then create spline curves over this which represent the various regions of texture. Then cut the grid with each of these splines to create seperate regions with smooth borders. Finally, seperate the regions into individual objects, and apply a repeating seamless texture to each so that the texture looks nice and detailed.

And that's it. These courses don't even seem to have lightmapping just vertex lighting, so you're all set there, though I do see a tree casting a shadow. My shadow system could do that for you.

"This actually leads me to my second question... Is there a good tutorial on multitexuring which is specific to the way you can apply it in Blitz3D on terrains?

I would like to use multilayered tilable textures that are selectively shown using alpha maps. After nearly 1 year of fiddling, I still cannot figure out how this is properly done in Blitz3D."


As for this... You don't want to do that. You could for example, overlay a particular section of a terrain using a second texture layer that has an alpha map. However, doing so would mean the ENTIRE rest of the terrain would have twolayers of textures on it... even if it doesn't look like there are. On top of that, only high end cards can do more than two texture layers at once. So other cards would have to render the terrain multiple times.

Finally, Blitz terrains are slower than the equivalent 3D model. That, combined with their poor texturing, makes them unsuitable for doing a real game. Use meshes. I'm 90% certain you can get just as good results as you see there, in Blitz.

Thank you very much for your help sswift. You confirmed what I already suspected. Since it comes from you, I'll take it as the authorative answer.

I suspect if you use max, you'll find patch grids to be the solution.

Btw, you'll want to split your course up so that the whole course is not one mesh. Try to cut it into roughly square sections down the length of the course. This is so Blitz can hide those sections that are out of view, which will speed up rendering, and collision. Splittign the course up is a balancing act. Each new entity increases the number of surfaces. You want to minimize the number of surfaces, but you also want to minimize the number of polygons the system has to render and look at when doing collisions. And you do that by making multiple entities, preferably ones which fit nicely into a spherical or cube region since that is the shape of the volume that will be used to quickly throw them away if out of view of the camera, or to determine they are not being touched by any colliding object.

I with I had a link for you because a while ago someone posted screenshots of a golf course they were creating in Blitz, and those looked really good.

Oh goody, golf!

I can tell you from personal experience how it’s done at least with the company I work for. We did a number of golf games including 2 version of Microsoft Golf and now are producing an indoor golf simulator.

We use Maya to create the meshes for the holes. sswift is right in that we define the different areas by breaking up the mesh and texturing them separately with tiled textures, at least in the case of mass areas like fairway. In the case of transition areas like from sand to grass (we go overboard with this but it looks nice) we texture each quadrangle of the transition area with a transition texture. I can tell you this takes A VERY LONG TIME because we do transitions between almost everything. It is frustrating in fact how long it takes to do right, which is why for my purposes I want to experiment with height map based terrains.