Natural elevations
Last time we were talking about basic elevation techniques such as humps and ridges and the main method for changing elevations in apcd which is basically grabbing verts and moving them up and down in the x axis (F8) using the perspective view window.
Now we are going to move onto more practical examples of how to incorporate these into the course itself. One of the main things that seperates good elevation work from bad is the way the elevations are done accross texture boundaries. Its all too easy to lose the overall slope of the land and finish up with something that resembles a series of terraces that you just wont find on most golf courses. This problem occurs through the impropper use of guard rings round some of the terrain features like greens, bunkers etc. Elevation should ideally flow from one texture to the next without a significant step or break
Here is a basic example of a green area mesh ready to start elevation, we can add more verts if we need them later. This area took about 15 minutes to mesh in using the terrain painter method. If it takes you longer don't worry, with practice your "meshing in" time will be reduced. Remember if the terrain painter adds two verts close together by mistake instead of just one, press ctrl-z to undo the last step and click again where you want the vert. If it still refuses to add just one vert, you can come back to it later and delete the extra vert by selecting it and then pressing shift-delete for a non destructive delete of the offending vert ( do not just press delete when the vert is selected or you will find a gaping big hole in your mesh!)
I'm going to select the verts I'm going to raise to create the back mound (pic below) and raise them about 3 or 4 feet.
With all the edges of the texture set to level 4 you will see that we have a problem, the bottom line of the elevation is very angular and not at all realistic. What we need to do now is make that elevation flow into the fairway, fringe and green just as it would do on a real course so we are going to have to make and move some more verts. I'm going to add a line of verts before I do anything else so we can make a more gradual elevation change in a few minutes. In the pic below you can see the proposed new line of verts. This will make the gradual slope we need easier to create.
I'm now going to select these lines of verts in turn (pic below) and raise them a little in the X-axis (F8). how much I raise them depends on how the elevation is going to look but I'll generally raise them gradually less the nearer I get to the green to create a nice flow of the elevation.
This low angle view shows the final elevation transition from mound to green better.
You may notice the harsh texture difference between the rough and the fairway area. In apcd 1.1 there is not much you can do about this as the texture mapping is very limited. In apcd 1.5 however we can smooth these texture into each other using "seam blending" which makes the trasition from one texture to another much softer. The same area using apcd 1.5 and seam blending looks like this.
Texture mapping aside this is the basic way to tie your elevations from one texture to another without those sharp breaks in the slope that we sometimes see. It's all about the gradual raising of several lines of verts to make the elevation change over a wider area. Occasionally you'll want a sharp slope but make sure that you don't have a sharp change in elevation from one texture to the next or you will get an ugly sharp line and a very unrealistic look indeed.
For those who don't yet know anything about seam mapping, path mapping, texture blending etc, you might want to skip this bit because its a bit more advanced and I'll be doing a full tutorial on the basics of seam mapping in future.
For those who do know a little about seam mapping, I've used this line of faces to insert my rough/fairway seam texture and then path mapped it followed by the multiple map and the fairway/fringe area is done by making a very small extrusion, resizing the green/fringe slightly smaller by an inch or two and then adding my fairway/green seam texture to it and then seam mapping it. I don't seam map the fringe to green area as this is usually a pretty sharp line on a real golf course.
I'll continue to elevate this green area in the next tutorial.