Blending bunkers

[Stephen Sullivan]

Got to that stage with Close House, and I'm wondering the best way to do them in terms of blends. I'm doing the first one on the first using Lez Marwick's texture method, but it's taking an age to get the verts in the right position to get rid of the "shadows* caused by the sharp edges constraining the texture.

What do designers out there think is the best way to do it? I've always struggled to get the dirt to look right using the other method.

[LeWAW]

Difficult to have a good answer... Each courses have his own kind of bunkers...
Personnally I prefer the extrude method... But it depends of your course because it's a real one...

[Stephen Sullivan]

Trawled through my saved tutorials and came across one on bunker lips that I believe was done by Paul Seaman. It's quite detailed and suggests creating a "special" planar mapping for the lip that looks best in the direction the golfer is facing.

Is this something other designers use? I would assume you would need several different ones as bunkers don't all face the same way.

[AJ Allen]

Stephen, I did try that combined texture method initially, because I thought it sounded like an easy way to get it done, as well as avoiding two seams. But like you, I found that there was a lot of fiddling around to get it looking right, as well as the fact that you don't have as much control over varying the thickness of the lip.

I guess everyone has their own methods, but I did a few different trials when I was starting my Coomealla course to find what worked best for me. The screenshot below shows one of the bunker lips. Here is what I found when doing them...

*I try to do the elevation work in that area after I have drawn out the shape, but before I have added any verts for the bunker. Get a better more natural slop that way.

*When I do the first extrusion (the one to put in the rough to dirt blend), I only resize it a tiny bit smaller, and drop it down only a little as well. I move the verts to make sure they are as close to parallel as possible.

*With the next extrusion, I try to make it the same as the first as far as resize and dropping the ground level. That seems to avoid getting a "crease line" between the two seam blends.

*I use the custom bunker alpha I sent to you a while back. The one that has 2/3 rough or sand, and only 1/3 dirt. That helps with being able to get a nice thin area between the rough and the sand.

* I set a planar for the dirt to make it nice and small so it will show details when it's only a thin blend.

That's about it really. I find this to actually be quicker than doing that single blend method as it doesn't take much more time to do an extra blend, not if you don't have to go around tweaking verts and stuff when you are done.

OK, well that's how I do it. hope that was helpful. If you look at the screenshot, you can see the dirt layer is probably only a few inches thick, which I think is fairly realistic. Oh and forgot to mention. I have all the edges in and around the bunker set to 0, I never change to -1 just to pull in the texture while Im working on it, as I don't see a need to. It all goes back into shape when the bunker is done.

Cheers, AJ

[Stephen Sullivan]

That's great AJ, and what I'm going to do. Did you use the default planar for the dirt, or did you make one that is vertical and looks best in the direction of play?

[Adelade]

Yea a lot of different ways to do them and I hesitate to post my method because I definitely dont think mine is the best nor the prettiest, but I will say I think it is extremely efficient in getting decent results with minimum effort and is applicable the same way to any irregular shape bunkers. I started out with Paul Seaman's guide that you mention, tried it out, it was good but I didnt 100% like it (probably because I didnt have the exact same alphas and dirt texture). So I looked at courses by top designers, experimented a little of my own and finally settled on something that was both simple and - at least to me - pretty enough. I dont know if I will keep using same method in future, I probably will but who knows, I will probably try some different style bunkers at some point. Either way, I as well am very interested to see what other designers might have to say about this

Screenshot of result (Whirlpool GC - closeup cam):

BunkerLip WhirlP.jpg (225.64 KiB) Viewed 3976 times

1. I start by extruding the whole bunker down the tiniest step which I believe is usually around 3 cm (about 1.2 inch), then a second time again. The exact distance down is personal preference and can be easily adjusted later on, but last time with Whirlpool I did 3 steps (around 9 cm). It probably depends on how deep the bunkers are too, Whirlpool ones were usually pretty steep at the edges so I may go with less next time.
2. Unsharpen all edges in the area with Edge region select on the extrusion and changing sharpness to 1 then back to 0.
3. Applying 2 textures to the area (A quick way of separating them is using vert region select on the extrusion, de-selecting (with ctrl+click) the sand, then Face > Select > Convert From Vertex, though I guess you can alternatively apply textures between each extrusion instead). Rough-Dirt Seamblend on top and Dirt-Sand seamblend bottom, I use no actual Dirt texture by itself anywhere. If anyone wants to try my alphas and dirt here they are, but different ones can certainly be applied according to taste: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/30unzkh2c5bv ... EghBa?dl=0
4. Seamblend the 2 blends as normally with V Wrap 10, the mapping for the Dirt I settled on using is a horizontal one with Uniform Scale 4.0, but it depends a lot on what dirt texture one uses. I dont remember super clearly what exactly about the Paul Seaman method (of aligning the dirt planar per bunker and hole direction) that I didnt like, but one thing it does cause is some stretching in the areas that line up with the hole direction. The theory is that you dont usually see those areas very much because camera will be turned towards the hole but yea its down to personal taste, Im not saying the method is bad, just not what I decided to go with.
(5. At the end one can easily experiment with pulling verts of whole bunker (or even all bunkers of the whole course) and different sections of the lip down/up to create slightly different looks.

Thats all. I dont angle the lower parts of the extrusions inwards or anything, I mostly use irregular shape bunkers so it cant be done just by scaling verts, and I dont feel like its needed for how I do them. Maybe it would slightly help to mitigate those odd net-like shadows that occasionally show up in Links in some steep bunker edges faced in certain directions, but I see those things in courses done by the best of the best designers so I assume there is just no good way to get rid of them.

[Adelade]

Also, I remember noticing that its usually easier to get things to look good the darker dirt texture you use, however Im not a big fan of too dark dirtlips and always tried to create something with relatively bright lips. Other techniques, such as the Paul Seaman one with the dirt mapping for example, probably work better with darker dirt.

[AJ Allen]

bunkerlip2.jpg (434.6 KiB) Viewed 3968 times

That's great AJ, and what I'm going to do. Did you use the default planar for the dirt, or did you make one that is vertical and looks best in the direction of play?

I only did the planar so I could scale the size of the dirt grains. If I was going to be doing tall lips, or have them more straight up and down, then I would also set the planar to be vertical. But for very shallow ones like I used it seemed fine just scaling it.

If I zoom in really really close in APCD, you can just see the tiniest join line between the two blends. but it is so small you can't see it in the gameplay, even if you look hard for it. See the screenshot.

Cheers, AJ

[Stephen Sullivan]

Thanks for all the input. Think I am happy with how the basic lips are looking on the first couple of bunkers. As it's a real course, I suppose I should try and match the look, but there aren't many good pictures, so I may have to look closely at the hole flyovers.