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Introducing TGC Designer Tools and Real Course Recreation Lidar Import

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  • Introducing TGC Designer Tools and Real Course Recreation Lidar Import

    Hi everyone!

    I've been hard at work for the last month developing tools that primarily will import Lidar data into TGC 2019 Courses.

    There have been a lot of ups and downs, but I'm at the point where I'm ready to accept feedback from the community.

    A completed course file is available here:
    https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RYW...ew?usp=sharing

    Please don't publish this course in game, it's not completed and I call 'dibs' on publishing this course after I finish decorating it.


    I've completed the proof-of-concept phases and have created playable, realistic courses. I'm still working on the User Interface and instructions to make this the easiest that it can be, but I wanted to open the tools up for developers to contribute fixes.

    The source code is available free on Github and releases will be available there under the "Releases" link. I'm targeting the initial release in a week or two as a Windows download:




    Click image for larger version  Name:	 Views:	1 Size:	37.9 KB ID:	184974

    I also am supporting import from OpenStreetMap golf courses ( https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=1...576/-115.28536 ) into TGC as splines if you don't want the lidar elevation or can't get lidar for your course.





    Quick tips if you want to get started on your OpenStreetMap course: use the highest quality sat image available, map greens along the inside of THE FRINGE, map bunkers on the outside lip, map water on the outside lip.

    For more information on the process or if you want to support future features of this tool, please read here: https://www.patreon.com/chadgolf

    I hope this brings enjoyment to everyone. We all have courses that are personally meaningful to us, and I hope this software inspires you to create something for the community.
    - Chad

    Special thanks to MTHunt, crazycanuck1985, friendBOMBER, and HTdumps for initial feedback and guidance.

    Instructions and a tutorial linked from this page: https://chadrockey.github.io/TGC-Designer-Tools/
    Attached Files
    Last edited by ChadGolf; 02-07-2019, 07:06 PM.

  • #46
    ChadGolf Will your tool work with only OSM data? I haven't been able to find any LIDAR data for my home course (D'arcy Ranch here is Alberta, Canada). I don't have TGC 2019 or I would try it myself. If it does work with just the OSM data I may just go ahead and buy the steam version just for the designer.

    Comment


    • ChadGolf
      ChadGolf commented
      Editing a comment
      This feature is planned (flat course with just splines) from OpenStreetMap.

      I can’t decide what the most reliable import is for this. I’m thinking I’ll accept an exporter OSM file that they let you download.

      For the lidar, I can calculate the latitude longitude boundaries of the course and use the OpenStreetMap directly. But there there isn’t a simple way other than the OSM files for the user, so I’ll have to add more tooling. :|

      This might be released this weekend. Making the terrain look better and eliminating the cliffs is the current priority item.

  • #47
    i'm at the last step...exporting course. I create a different name for the course (than the template one) drop in the course directory but when I go in 2019 2 courses with the name of my template come up. I'm sure it's something simple but I'm not finding it. Any suggestions are appreciated! Anxious to see how it works.

    Comment


    • frodaddy00
      frodaddy00 commented
      Editing a comment
      I bet you left your original course file there.. the autogenerated courses in tgc i think get random names like YzPiO9th.course.. delete the original and you should only see the new one you copied to the courses folder.

    • Topcat
      Topcat commented
      Editing a comment
      That was the issue....thanks!

  • #48
    I just started this afternoon mapping my course in OSM, nice mapping features by the way. Do I need to tag everything such as fairways, greens so these will be importing correctly or can I just outline as an area? I have been tagging all areas as "golf" "tee area" for example. Next step to see if LIDAR is available for this area. The course is the Prairies,Cahokia, IL. It's a dog track but we play a league there. Thanks great so far, thanks Chad.

    Comment


    • jrz
      jrz commented
      Editing a comment
      Please take a look at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/...%3Dgolf_course for information on how to properly tag features of a golf course.

    • Fhacker
      Fhacker commented
      Editing a comment
      Yes I will keep tagging everything. I see now on tutorial u can check boxes for items tagged when importing. Very nice

    • Fhacker
      Fhacker commented
      Editing a comment
      ChadGolf. FYI, the LAS files extracted fine and your tool found the EPSG codes in those files, so no problem with that. I did a test run with only a few holes tagged in OSM. Now to go back and run again with all 18 holes tagged in OSM, what course file do I pull up in your tool? The semi built one with LIDAR in it already or start with a new blank one and reimport LIDAR and OSM again. Kudos to u for doing this, FAntastc so far, Great work.

  • #49
    ChadGolf I checked the raw visual and it shows the overlapping like RussWest's data.

    Comment


    • ChadGolf
      ChadGolf commented
      Editing a comment
      All lidar data requires overlapping, the plane takes specific routes to avoid missing any areas.

      Specifically, if you have any data categorized as Unclassified:0, then it may slip through right now. In FugroViewer, click the color by category button and then View -> point styles and uncheck all but 0 and 2. If there are any nonground points, that’s the issue.

  • #50
    I found a nice trick maybe obvious but thought I'd share. The default "rocky" grass was showing up everywhere as I've been tinkering with the course builder tool and its a pain to map everything as rough or heavy rough in OSM.

    Just edit your default course you start with and lay down rough or heavy rough first with a huge brush and cover the entire land. This doesn't seem to count against your resource meter and now when I build my course with the tool all of the non-fairway grass is a nice consistent rough.

    Comment


    • ChadGolf
      ChadGolf commented
      Editing a comment
      Nice trick! Yes the brushes can do amazing work, especially covering the course efficiently.

      I think I’m of the opinion that the “rough” OpenStreetMap should really only be used on desert courses. These require precise placement of the rough vs native areas and the splines and sat images help. When “the rough” is anywhere that’s not mown short, I don’t think it’s as helpful.

    • mthunt
      mthunt commented
      Editing a comment
      The issue with doing this is it will make your first cut in the fairways wavy.

    • frodaddy00
      frodaddy00 commented
      Editing a comment
      Thanks for the heads up.

      I'm struggling with my fairways themselves being a little wavy before I tried this change out to fix the rough. Still trying to figure out how place my splines out to get rid of the waves.

  • #51
    This is such a game changer. Not only the LIDAR data for the elevations but also to be able to mark everything in OSM is soooo much easier then the TGC designer. And doesn't need as much power. I'm actually outlining the course, hassards, fairways, bunker.... on my office laptop at work. Or my private laptop at home. Thanks ChadGolf for doing this. I'm going to spend a few weeks doing some courses as high quality as I can on OSM and then try to find some good LIDAR data for them. Really seems to be an issue in Germany but I will contact the German Golf Association to see if they can provide some.

    Comment


    • ChadGolf
      ChadGolf commented
      Editing a comment
      Thanks!

      I did some Googling and it's quite a weird situation in Germany. I hope it works out eventually.

      UPDATE: (January 6th): Our new tutorial „downloading Bonn in LiDAR„. UPDATE: (January 9th): Now a second state went open LiDAR as well. UPDATE: (March 6th): New tutorial „merging Bonn into proper LAS files„ Kudos to OpenNRW for offering online download links for hundreds of Gigabytes of open LiDAR for the entire state of North Rhine-Westphalia (Nordrhein-Westfalen) as announced a few months […]

  • #52
    Got it to work. Absolutely amazing.

    Comment


    • Solstice72
      Solstice72 commented
      Editing a comment
      Wow. How much time did that just save, a month?

  • #53
    Originally posted by Genghis View Post
    ChadGolf I checked the raw visual and it shows the overlapping like RussWest's data.
    ChadGolf How can you check for ungrounded points once you only check 0 and 2? Thanks for helping... I'm learning new things

    Comment


    • ChadGolf
      ChadGolf commented
      Editing a comment
      Thanks I found your lidar and i suspected this could happen as well. For areas where they do not classify overlapping points, it seems like it's up to the lidar company to determine how to classify these "extra" points. Most companies just classify every point and have double the density which is nice. The previous example classified them as '0'. Yours uses custom definitions of 18 and 25, but the fix I prepared for this handles your situation as well.

      You should have no more issues once I release the new version this weekend. Nice work tracking down the lidar viewer!

    • Genghis
      Genghis commented
      Editing a comment
      Thanks! I saw that there was some data under some of the undefined points.

  • #54
    One project that I'm working on is a RCR for a site where the golf course is still in the planning stage. And it is a dramatic site, so the terrain would be difficult to get to the adequate level and impossible to ever get perfectly. It wasn't worth doing manually. But with this, it took me about 30 minutes to follow the tutorial all the way through and set up my course (note that in this case there was no course to trace, so that saved time).

    Here is a pic of the first hole that I'm working on. I didn't move an inch of dirt, just painted on the green, fairway, and a little sand. The eroding coastline and natural dunes import is incredible.

    One question that I have is whether it is possible to rotate the heightmap. One of the Delta backgrounds has water on one side and hills to the other and I really need my coast to match up with that orientation. Right now it is the opposite, so I reverted to the background with 360 degrees of water.

    I hope HB appreciates what you've done Chad. Once people get used to this, the quality level of the RCRs and the coverage of the great courses and local gems is going to make the game worth a lot more money. It will also increase the longevity I believe since new courses keep things from getting stale.

    Click image for larger version

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    Comment


    • ChadGolf
      ChadGolf commented
      Editing a comment
      Yes, you can go to the first tab "Tools" and use the Rotate Course and Shift Course tools to rotate the course to align to the water and move it over closer to the shore.

      Don't forget to (in TGC) go to Course Settings -> Terrain Settings -> Background and choose the one that looks best for you!

    • frodaddy00
      frodaddy00 commented
      Editing a comment
      Wow I thought my course was elevated. This one looks dangerous!

  • #55
    ChadGolf Where did you find the TGC documentation that allowed you to build this? I just searched for an hour and could not find any technical information at all.

    Comment


    • #56
      Originally posted by jrz View Post
      ChadGolf Where did you find the TGC documentation that allowed you to build this? I just searched for an hour and could not find any technical information at all.
      Pretty sure he reverse engineered pretty much everything. Extremely impressive.

      Comment


      • #57
        Question for the group concerning OSM. What background do you see being most consistent? I made an OSM overlay with a local course, but when I rendered it in TGC, you could tell the greens and sand traps were just a bit off. I went back today and cycled through the different background sources and noticed that they don't all align to the same spot. The most accurate may depend on your region.

        Comment


        • ChadGolf
          ChadGolf commented
          Editing a comment
          I've found that it differs even by zoom levels, but OSM has an Adjust Imagery Offset feature that can help with this. Here's some of their official discussion:


          The sat imagery will vary depending on the angle of where the sat was when it took the photo, there will always be some projection distortion but we want to minimize it. Look at trees and other tall things to see some examples.

          You have three options: 1) Get everything perfect in OSM, use the GPS sat tracks, use the imagery that you can see the most detail with (varies by your region). For this, I usually do a distinctive feature (water hazard or bunker), then run through the whole process and see how it looks in game. Then go back and use the Adjust Imagery Offset until I think it's right. This can reset on you though, so be careful and check work you've already done to see if it looks right before you do more work.

          2) As long as everything is traced ON THE SAME IMAGE and AT THE SAME ZOOM RANGES, then the relative distances will be correct. When you import OpenStreetMap data, use the Fine Shift West->East and the Fine Shift South->North (these are in meters) and the positions of all imported features will be shifted for you. You'll just have to write down these values, but it'll always be the same for you.

          3) If your course already exists, you can just shift terrain on the Tools Tab and achieve a similar effect. You may need to make a new course directory and 'unpack' your existing course.

          The main thing is you do NOT want to switch images halfway through or you may have half of the features aligned differently from the other half and there's nothing you can do other than right-click -> move in OpenStreetmap on each one to fix it or to fix it inside the game.

          Eventually I hope we can figure out reliable instructions for this and make a wiki/update OpenStreetMap's guides and lead users into the least complicated and least risk of having bad data.

      • #58
        I have an idea for the mask that could be used to save editor space to keep it from becoming unresponsive on large pieces of land. Maybe make a specific color value that could be used to instruct the tool to render said shaded areas correctly, but in a much lower resolution.

        Comment


        • ChadGolf
          ChadGolf commented
          Editing a comment
          This is in the plans and may make the release this week. I'm still determining how to do variable resolution without leaving holes or inconsistencies. It is unfortunate that I can't use Sculpt Terrain (only Sculpt Height) because then I would be very confident I could just stack the various layers on top of each other.

          I'd like to see: Mask Red: Very Low Resolution, Unmasked Default Resolution, Masked Green: Very High Resolution

          It just takes iterations and time but reducing resource usage and file size is up there in priorities.

      • #59


        Some info for UK Lidar
        Sources: https://data.gov.uk/dataset/977a4ca4...ar-point-cloud





        With the UK Lidar data you download your selected SQUARE (luckily mine did not cross over a "square" the square, which has 30-40 laz files, forming a 5 x 5 grid of smaller tiles, some are layered)
        I loaded them into Fugro and reduced the laz files to 4 which my course resides on, 2 of which seem to be a layer under each other.

        Metadata
        The metadata does not come per laz file, it is the whole metadata for the entire UK consisting of file extensions:
        .CPG which just states UTF-8 (1k)
        .DBF large database files (302Mb)
        .PRJ which holds this info:
        PROJCS["British_National_Grid",GEOGCS["GCS_OSGB_1936",DATUM["D_OSGB_1936",SPHEROID["Airy_1830",6377563.396,299.3249646]],PRIMEM["Greenwich",0.0],UNIT["Degree",0.0174532925199433]],PROJECTION["Transverse_Mercator"],PARAMETER["False_Easting",400000.0],PARAMETER["False_Northing",-100000.0],PARAMETER["Central_Meridian",-2.0],PARAMETER["Scale_Factor",0.9996012717],PARAMETER["Latitude_Of_Origin",49.0],UNIT["Meter",1.0]]

        .SHP (27mb)
        .SHX (1Mb)

        .XML (9Mb) searched for EPSG had one reference: AUTHORITY["EPSG",27700]

        I tried EPSG 27700 but get a black area.

        Anything I can do in fugro or other settings within tgc_gui to help?
        Last edited by vrpunk; 02-15-2019, 03:47 PM.

        Comment


        • DannyMRICS
          DannyMRICS commented
          Editing a comment
          Vrpunk,

          Great find. What software do you need to view the downloaded data?

          Dan

        • vrpunk
          vrpunk commented
          Editing a comment
          Just google fugro Viewer

        • ChadGolf
          ChadGolf commented
          Editing a comment
          Your lidar provider didn't populate the "intensity" field which is how bright or white the laser says the ground/object is.

          I'll have to add a check for situations like this and try to create an alternate rendering that still kind of shows the golf course.

      • #60
        I'm not sure if I should report a bug on github or here. I'm running the updated scripts from github in pycharm. It looks like the tool is looking for a lidar file that doesn't exist. But I'm using the same files as I did before.

        I attached the output from the lidar importer.
        Attached Files

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