New Texture blending techniques
The adding of seam blending in apcd 1.5 has opened up a door that I believe will herald a new era in golf course visualisation. Never before have we been given the tools to create such lifelike images of golf courses.
I have been slightly disapointed so far that most designers have used the ability to blend textures by using an alpha channel, simply to smooth transitions between areas of different textures ie rough/fairway etc. When creating Shadowlands I used this blending ability to alter textures by adding dry and worn spots to the course just like you would see on a real course. This (to my thinking at least) elevated the graphics a little bit above the norm and brought my goal of an almost photorealistic course that much closer.
It struck me that this blending could go even a step further and I set to work on some new techniques. After updating Royal County Kilderry (a seaside links type course) I knew that to create the realistic wild and rolling terrain some more extravagant blending of multiple fairway and rough textures would be required and I set to work on making a texture set that would do the job and also tried many different ways of blending them together to achieve the look I was after.
You can see the results below. When I first did this I was very surprised and impressed with the way it turned out. This is a picture from the test course I use to try different things but I then set to work to use these techniques on the Kilderry update.
What do you think?
