Ocean-Beach

[SLucey]

I seem to vaguely recall a conversation present on the old forum regarding blending Ocean to Beach (ie., waves, spray, etc, etc effect). I've been experimenting with trying this using both vertical & horizontal extruding. Would I be correct in assuming this is not the way to produce an Ocean-to-Beach seam blend? Is there some special way this has to be done?

[sagevanni]

I would never use "extrude" for ocean, shoreline blends. I've used from 1 to 4 seam blends for ocean to shore transitions......

ocean blend-1.JPG (168.7 KiB) Viewed 2042 times

ocean blend-2.JPG (80.08 KiB) Viewed 2042 times

[Adelade]

I have not yet made any ocean to beach sections myself, but if I was to make one, I would study ocean setting courses made by Sage, McCoist and Lez Marwick, since they are not locked and viewing of their courses was openly welcomed by them. IMPORTANT: Do NOT open them up in the APCD you normally use, make a copy of your existing APCD folder or of a fresh install of APCD perhaps, and open other courses than your own with that separate APCD to avoid risk of troublesome issues. Likewise remember not to accidentally work on your own courses on the APCD made for viewing other people's courses afterwards.

There may be other designers too with ocean blends worth studying but those are the ones I can think of straight away. Why not Lez' Anakena Beach for example?

I know one method worth mentioning (although I dont know how effective in this case) is to path map a single texture displaying both sides of a blend within itself. Lez talks about this method for bunker blends in one of his videos, and a sample texture ("Shoreline.tga") of this can be found in the APCD > Samples folder. Its old and only 512x512 but maybe it can be used, Im just saying it should demonstrate the idea. The main downside of this method is that the whole section can only have one property, so its impossible to make golfballs within the game interact with the whole area realistically. Normally ocean to beach areas are hardly in play and often even Out of Bounds so that may not be an issue within this discussion. Without having tried it, to me it seems like a very potent method to make blends that arent in play look extremely good.

Lez video about it (and it should show how one could do the same for ocean to beach or other types) can be found at:
(I suppose its probably mainly part 2 that is of interest to this discussion)
Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TZ8wSen_hs
Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja8o1tdcFb4

One could study whether ocean blends are made with that method or not even for locked courses in practice mode, checking if the displayed texture changes across a blend or not.