Nine Bridges Course at Jeju Island

[sagevanni]

Looks very nice so far....!!!!!

Sage.....

[Ian Wells]

Looking good.
When are you expecting the Beta release?
Ian

[Adelade]

When are you expecting the Beta release?

I think the optimistic answer would be something like in 3-5 months but it could take a lot longer too, mostly depending on whether I get bored with the bunkers, probably.

[Adelade]

Small update - a more inclusive APCD journal entry is coming in a couple weeks (hopefully?) when I can do a screenshot of a first hole having been seam blended!

It has been about 4.5 months since my last post so I figured an update is almost overdue, I never really expected the optimistic estimation to come true, but it has been going pretty well. I can feel myself growing more and more torn about whether to release a pseudo alpha or beta version or how much to complete before that point, I still think I will most likely save most of the less important surrounding 3D work etc to come back to some other year, in favour of getting to focus on other courses in between that Im eager to get to, but we will see, Im getting more keen on doing underplanting before a release for one thing. The course is already finished in terms of gameplay, unless you count some future edits to edges of some water hazards that will only impact play very slightly if the player ends up there. Everything from now on is really for visuals, and the main bit of that is the seam blending, after which I imagine most players would consider it finished enough so to speak. With all this in mind, it is impossible to give an accurate estimation on a first release or alpha or beta or whatever I decide to go with, but unless underplanting ends up slowing it down a lot, I feel very hopeful that it could be ready in a couple months.

As I said, Im expecting to start seamblending sometime within the next couple weeks, which is really exciting, I know the course will really come alive in its look after that. I feel my motivation to sit down and work with APCD having grown a lot lately as that point has gotten closer and closer. Just a few minor edits to certain edges of revetted bunker faces to manually accomodate for seamblend paths where extrusions wont work.

May 2021 Scr 2 jpeg.jpg (391.2 KiB) Viewed 7068 times

[Duglis]

This is excellent news. Looks great!!! Very excited and Happy!

[Still Linksing]

Looking good Adelade!

[Adelade]

Well I originally planned on doing all seamblends of one hole at a time, but instead I decided to do all seamblends of certain texture groups on the whole course before moving to next texture group (to keep my cleaned-out texture list clean and faster to navigate during the process), so therefore I wont have that screenshot of a completed hole that I mentioned for a while. All holes will be completed in quick succession towards the end of the whole seamblending process instead.

Currently doing the path, forest and heavy rough related seamblends, which are the most annoying ones because thats where most of the many annoying 3-way texture intersections are. For those, I started using a custom planar for the last connecting face of the intersections where necessary, which gets the job done really well. It is just some tedious fiddling with sectioning off extrusions and extra mappings and stuff, definitely the slowest and least fun texture group to persevere through... Done with those through 7 holes at the moment.

Oh also, while experimenting with and planning my seamblends last week, I realized that with steep sod wall bunkers you run into the strange issue with net-like mesh shadows on a whole new level and to much greater extents than I had ever encountered before... That issue has been brought up on these forums several times and seems ultimately unsolvable because it is just how the lighting in APCD and Links interacts with mesh at certain angles, and the only "solution" seems to be to disguise or make the effect as inconspicuous as possible. The most "effective" way of doing that seems to be to simply avoid having steep elevations, but thats not really a good solution if you want to make true-to-life potbunkers or just in general recreate a real course's steep elevations... I inspected some other courses with pot bunkers up close and couldnt really identify anything special to mitigate the issue except for one thing - having more irregular, less smooth/clean/uniform textures and alphas, and perhaps also having darker textures. I didnt really fancy the idea of doing that at first too much, because I wanted a fairly clean look for this course, but I made some subtle edits that I ended up really happy with. I think adding a slight bit of irregularity to the textures and alphas really helped with masking the issue, so thats a tip for anyone else encountering that.

Edit: A picture just to show what kind of effect Im talking about - on another course:

Net-like Shadows.jpg (594.61 KiB) Viewed 6827 times

[Adelade]

Seamblending done! Lovely to see the textures come alive and together, teasing screenshots below. Guess I can finally do that "journal" update too.

Since the December update I finished making the paths, the main planting edits, various minor colour edits of textures and objects and sculpted all the bunkers. Then I made temporary edited versions of all textures that featured sort of grid mowlines, in order to visualize elevations better (which by the way made the course look quite interesting), and made various final elevation edits - some to more closely match videos and pictures of the real course, and others to simply get rid of sharp unnatural terrain. I also added the first cut, and made the car road around the course area since it comes into view on one or two holes, made some extremely basic bridges for it and some basic parking lot areas by the clubhouse. Finally made the stone walls at the edge of 3 of the water hazards and then spent the last month seamblending, it took longer than I expected and the mapping count ended up just shy of 1700 (I think I only had around 700 on Amedal) but now the seamblending is all done! And the visual payoff feels even better than I expected.

Still plenty left to do before uploading anything though, first Im going to see if I can make the stone wall on the 5th hole which is of a trickier type than the other ones, but I have an idea of how to do it with just texture work that I hope will work out. Then some hole preview edits, crowd planting and some minor quick stuff. Then Im going to do at least some (potentially very basic) 3D work of the most essential structures like the tea houses, 18th bridge and clubhouse. As for grass and bush planting... I think Im going to go ahead and do it before uploading anything after all, and I could see it delaying an upload for maybe even a month (early August?) but that depends on how many new objects I end up wanting to make. I may also end up doing more work on water edges instead of leaving it for the final, but we'll see.

June 2021 H3 jpeg.jpg (419.77 KiB) Viewed 6687 times

June 2021 H6 jpeg.jpg (432.55 KiB) Viewed 6687 times

June 2021 H10 jpeg.jpg (545.06 KiB) Viewed 6687 times

June 2021 H18 jpeg.jpg (393.79 KiB) Viewed 6687 times

[John B]

Looking great!

[Ian Wells]

Adelade,
The course is looking very good. I particularly like the pot bunker faces, very realistic long with the associated rough to sand seam.
Look forward to seeing the finished course.
Well done.
Ian