This tutorial covers the basics of creating borders and blends. For more details on how to achieve certain looks using borders and blends, see Grass Cuts and Natural Transitions.
Borders are an easy way to make shapes that surround and exactly match the outline of an existing shape. This is very useful for doing fringes around greens, first cuts around fairways, and bunker lips. Borders are attached to their parent shape and are inseparable. You can add a border to another border, giving the parent shape multiple nested borders. All of the options of regular shapes are available for borders.
To create a border, right click on a shape or another border and select:
Besides the normal options for shapes, there is an additional option to adjust a border's width. To do this, right click on the border and select:
Blends are a way to make a transition from one texture to another more natural instead of a hard edge.
To create a blend, right click on a shape or border and select:
Once the blend is created, right click on it for the following options:
The mask is a grayscale TGA image file used by the blend to define levels of opacity in the blend zone. Different textures and patterns in this image file create different effects such as patchy areas, sand specs, grass blades, and shadow illusions. The game comes with some default masks and I provide some custom masks I created in Grass Cuts and Natural Transitions.
For those interested in making their own masks, the grayscale in the image file represents a scale of opacity. White is opaque and black is transparent. That is, areas in the mask that are white make the texture of the shape the blend is on visible in the blend zone, while black areas make it invisible, and shades of gray represent translucency in between. The mask is mapped around the shape like a ribbon. The top of the image file is always on the inside, closest to the shape, and the bottom is on the outside, furthest from the shape.
Units for blend widths and border widths are set in meters, regardless of if you set the game options to use imperial units of measurement.