Good Idea or Bad Idea?

[linkster]

Kiawah_Island.jpg (220.77 KiB) Viewed 777 times

I did this DEM import a while ago to test an idea. It is always a trade off of how much course plot area to cover and how many verts to use. By decreasing the coverage area more verts can be used for the actual golf course and not the surrounding terrain. One of the advanced techniques I developed was masking out areas of the DEM to a low, flat elevation and then deleting them immediately after the DEM import.

When taking this masking idea to the extreme for some courses, it is possible to have holes on their own small plots. At a glance this works fine in the APCD and in game, aside from the visual impacts of seeing a broken terrain.

Here is a link to the course file for those who want to test this:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

I'll put this idea out there to all the APCD gurus first before including this in a tutorial.

[Adelade]

to a low, flat elevation

Could you elaborate on what you mean by this?

[linkster]

to a low, flat elevation

Could you elaborate on what you mean by this?

That is only to aid in the process of distinguishing and selecting the "masked out" verts in the APCD to be deleted. I have learned that you can select all the verts below the terrain plot by positioning the perspective view along the bottom verts and box selecting the entire area of masked verts in one step.

DEM imports have to be rectangular and contain some value of elevation. The DEM file format supports maximum elevations of -327.68 to 327.67 feet or meters when using 2 decimal places. APCD can handle negative elevations but hole positions must be on positive elevations. See: viewtopic.php?t=1927. So that makes the DEM plot area of elevation between 0 and 327.67 feet or meters. I usually set the masked out verts to -100.00 feet or meters to help select them for deleting.

[Colin Jones]

Not sure I meet the "guru" criteria, nor completely understand what you are doing, but I'll offer a view anyway....................

I like the elevation detail in a player's more faraway view. I think that's one of the positive things that your DEMS bring - because, I would suggest, most designers wouldn't have always focused so much on the acute elevation details of areas that are not in play. But, from a visual perspective, it often makes the view far more interesting. I wouldn't like to go back to having to handcraft those areas so, if I need to, I'll settle from a 3M rather than a 2M DEM to make that happen.

When I designed my few real courses, I always more thought "will the player's view be an authentic one from that spot on the golf course?" rather than being concerned with the immediate surrounds being topographically accurate to the inch.

That doesn't make what you are doing a "bad idea" tho. Just something where I think I can see what you are doing (which is incredibly creative and brilliant as always), just not something I would use.

Sorry if I am off track.....