Green/FW transition made easy

[meyo]

Hi All, here's a little video tutorial on how to get perfect smooth Green/FW transition. I will not take credit for this trick, I was watching one of mayday_golf83 streams and I saw him use it so all credit goes to him. This is mostly for the newer designers as the more experienced guys have no problems with transitions.

Hope it helps....

[mayday_golf83]

Dec 24, 2019 14:13:02 GMT -5 meyo said:

Hi All, here's a little video tutorial on how to get perfect smooth Green/FW transition. I will not take credit for this trick, I was watching one of mayday_golf83 streams and I saw him use it so all credit goes to him. This is mostly for the newer designers as the more experienced guys have no problems with transitions.

Hope it helps....

You've pretty much got it down Danny. I typically like to mark three waypoints for my transition, but anything from 2-4 works, whatever you're comfortable with. A few things to add/note:

1) Try to make your fairway corners coming into or going out of the transition zone where you have marked your waypoints as shallow as possible. This is especially true if you smooth your splines afterward, which I like to do. If your corner angle is too sharp, smoothing the corners may cause the waypoint handles to bulge outside the line of your green, or whatever surface you are trying to overlay, creating a weird bump where you get fairway peeking out from your green line.

2) Make sure you are using the same path width (and secondary surface width, if applicable) as the surface you are trying to blend. So, if you used the standard 2.5 width/3.5 secondary on the green, keep the same widths when you overlay fairway otherwise the surfaces won't match up.

3) This trick doesn't just work for fairway/green transitions. If I've splined a fairway, green, bunker, whatever and I want to add to it without moving around all the waypoints, I'll do the same thing. Figure out where I want to add, mark the transition waypoints on the current surface and trace over them as I make my new surface. 

It's a little putzy but, as Danny said, if you like using splines to put down your surfaces, it's a lot easier than having to tweak the waypoints to get the transitions to match up. Thanks for posting this!

[meyo]

Great info Jeremy, I did not know about the 1st point you made, thanks for sharing

[Deleted]

One other statemnt / question is: it appears that the width differential between primary and secondary surface matters more than the primary path width does. Is this true or is it a slightly non-linear relationship as path width increases?

[Terry Grayson]

Never saw this, never thought to try it, always jacked up transitions

Well I tried it and boom, worked like a charm, now I have 5 holes to tear up and redo the transitions

But Im happy to do it

Thanks gents... learn something new every day around here

[sandsaver01]

Super easy method!!! I am not a new designer, but I still struggle with moving points around to get smooth transitions - this is just the ticket.

[meyo]

Dec 24, 2019 22:18:22 GMT -5 arielatom said:

One other statemnt / question is: it appears that the width differential between primary and secondary surface matters more than the primary path width does. Is this true or is it a slightly non-linear relationship as path width increases?

That's a question that hopefully mayday_golf83 could answer as I don't know the exact answer to,

[mayday_golf83]

Dec 24, 2019 22:18:22 GMT -5 arielatom said:

One other statemnt / question is: it appears that the width differential between primary and secondary surface matters more than the primary path width does. Is this true or is it a slightly non-linear relationship as path width increases?

Trying to figure out exactly what your looking at Adam. Like I said, I make sure the widths for the primary and secondary surfaces are the same. So. If I’ve made a green spline with a width of 2.5 and toggle on a light rough texture at a width of 4.2 (that’s my go-to setting), when I lay the fairway over the top, it’s width is 2.5 and it’s secondary surface will be light roughy at 4.2. As long as you’ve got the waypoints aligned where you want the green and fairway to intersect, th transition will be seamless.

[Deleted]

Dec 25, 2019 10:33:49 GMT -5 mayday_golf83 said:

Dec 24, 2019 22:18:22 GMT -5 arielatom said:

One other statemnt / question is: it appears that the width differential between primary and secondary surface matters more than the primary path width does. Is this true or is it a slightly non-linear relationship as path width increases?

Trying to figure out exactly what your looking at Adam. Like I said, I make sure the widths for the primary and secondary surfaces are the same. So. If I’ve made a green spline with a width of 2.5 and toggle on a light rough texture at a width of 4.2 (that’s my go-to setting), when I lay the fairway over the top, it’s width is 2.5 and it’s secondary surface will be light roughy at 4.2. As long as you’ve got the waypoints aligned where you want the green and fairway to intersect, th transition will be seamless.

Good point. As to why I'd be using surfaces of different widths it stems from LiDAR courses. Most of the time the two paths don't have the same widths as green paths default to 1.7 and fairways to 3.0. Much of the time they end up more like 2.0 and 2.5ish or whatever nets the correct width and easier transitions, and as a result of this I had to guesstimate the light rough path width to try to make the two similar.

I have gone slightly wider than 2.5 on some paths on my fictional WIP as well and was using a 1.7 differential to make it all look more uniform.

Setting them both the same in this instance (say 4.2 for fairway light rough and 4.2 for green light rough ends up making the first cut around the green 'wider' than what is around the fairway. Because of this I had been using the differential between the two (say usually 1.5-1.9) to try to match up the light rough width. I don't know if it's an 'exact match' or more of a 'ballpark estimate,' and was wondering if someone else knew whether or not it is.

[sandsaver01]

Dec 25, 2019 15:35:08 GMT -5 arielatom said:

Setting them both the same in this instance (say 4.2 for fairway light rough and 4.2 for green light rough ends up making the first cut around the green 'wider' than what is around the fairway. Because of this I had been using the differential between the two (say usually 1.5-1.9) to try to match up the light rough width. I don't know if it's an 'exact match' or more of a 'ballpark estimate,' and was wondering if someone else knew whether or not it is.

Ariel - one way you can get the widths you want using Lidar is to put Chadgolf's little "Splines.json" program into your course file (see whole file below) and edit the widths and secondaries as you want them.

{
"bunker": {
"pathWidth": 1.7,
"handleLength": 1.0,
"tightSplines": true,
"secondarySurface": "",
"secondaryWidth": 2.5
},
"green": {
"pathWidth": 1.7,
"handleLength": 0.2,
"tightSplines": true,
"secondarySurface": "rough",
"secondaryWidth": 2.5
},
"teebox": {
"pathWidth": 1.7,
"handleLength": 2.0,
"tightSplines": true,
"secondarySurface": "rough",
"secondaryWidth": 3.5
},
"fairway": {
"pathWidth": 2.0,
"handleLength": 3.0,
"tightSplines": false,
"secondarySurface": "rough",
"secondaryWidth": 3.5
},
"rough": {
"pathWidth": 1.7,
"handleLength": 3.0,
"tightSplines": false,
"secondarySurface": "",
"secondaryWidth": 0.0
},
"heavyrough": {
"pathWidth": 1.7,
"handleLength": 3.0,
"tightSplines": false,
"secondarySurface": "",
"secondaryWidth": 0.0
},
"cartpath": {
"pathWidth": 2.0,
"handleLength": 4.0,
"tightSplines": false,
"secondarySurface": "",
"secondaryWidth": 0.0
},
"walkingpath": {
"pathWidth": 1.7,
"handleLength": 2.0,
"tightSplines": false,
"secondarySurface": "",
"secondaryWidth": 0.0
},
"pond": {
"pathWidth": 0.01,
"handleLength": 0.2,
"tightSplines": true,
"secondarySurface": "",
"secondaryWidth": 0.0
}
}

This seems to work well when you useChad's program to make Lidar courses with OSM.

[Deleted]

Why use that when you can just edit them in-game? Also, I'm adjusting my spline path widths inside the designer, which is why they're not all entirely uniform.

But I'm still very interested in that program. If that would enable one to set the default green spline paths a little wider I'd be all over that. Only thing is...if I were to use that, does it become impossible to edit spline path widths in the designer or is it just altering the defaults for import?

[sandsaver01]

Dec 26, 2019 12:09:05 GMT -5 arielatom said:

Why use that when you can just edit them in-game? Also, I'm adjusting my spline path widths inside the designer, which is why they're not all entirely uniform.

But I'm still very interested in that program. If that would enable one to set the default green spline paths a little wider I'd be all over that. Only thing is...if I were to use that, does it become impossible to edit spline path widths in the designer or is it just altering the defaults for import?

It just alters the defaults for import. You can edit each individual piece of texture in the designer to whatever you want.

[Deleted]

That's awesome! I will definitely have to give that a go, then.

[Crazycanuck1985]

Huh... I'll have to try this.

[paddyjk19]

If people want an easy method to do this with LiDAR / OSM then here’s how;

Map out the green spline on OSM and then when you do the fairway spline make sure to go around the green and share the points exactly with fairway and green, this will align your spline points perfectly once ported into the game giving you perfect transition.

You will also get a collar of light rough now seamless around the green as part of the fairway.

If you find that bits of fairway are showing round the perimeter of the green just nudge the green spline wider into the settings to 1.8 or 1.9 or make the fairway spline .1 narrower.

If people wants a photo tutorial of this I’m happy to share