Routing the course

You can't have a new course without new holes can you, and it's all very well having all this 'grand plan' stuff, but if the holes are no good, no-one will bother playing it.

So where do we begin?

I always begin literally on the drawing board with a pencil and paper. Over the years I've doodled enough holes to fit on 100 golf courses, but the trick is picking the one that best fits the land you are working on. Now I mentioned earlier that in apcd you always start with a dead flat plot, however, it doesn't have to stay that way for long.
You can import a DEM file or 'rough' up the terrain using some other method. The terrain builder feature is useful for stuff like this and you can transform your pancake like plot into a myriad of hills, valleys, lumps and bumps.

I'm used to dealing with very highly detailed terrain imported in from AutoCad which can make one hell of a mess with the underlying terrain mesh, so this time, for the sake of my sanity (more on that later!), I thought I'd use the terrain builder method to build my plot and after fiddling around with it for a while, I had a nice series of rolling hills to get me started.
At this point, a real course designer would be looking at a topo map of the terrain and making site visits to check for natural features that he could incorporate into his hole designs to make them interesting and unique. He would make what is called a course 'routing' plan which would be a rough plan of the path the holes will take over the terrain. He may come up with several routing's and clubhouse locations and then over time, will narrow them down until finally picking what he feels is the best one.
Routing the course to make the best use of the terrain is one, if not the most important aspects of real life design.

In apcd we have it much easier and we also have a vast army of 'virtual' bulldozer drivers at our beck and call, ready to spring into action and mould the terrain as we wish at any time. Unlike a real course designer, we don't have to worry about earth moving costs, cut and fill ratios, environmental issues and the like.

Armed with a vast array of pre-planned hole ideas, it's now a matter of looking around the plot to see where you may be able to drop them into the landscape without having to alter the underlying terrain significantly. Sometimes the way the land tumbles and rolls will suggest a hole design idea that you hadn't previously though of. This is part of the pleasure of the creative process but in this particular regard, real designers have it much easier, as real terrain is generally much more interesting than a bare apcd plot.

So I have my plot of land and I have my preliminary routing plan (in this case a clubhouse location close to the top of a gentle hill and two loops of 9 holes with each loop returning close to the clubhouse). The first hole I started to flesh out in more detail was in fact the par 3, 3rd which I showed a picture of yesterday. I wanted a short hole on which I could experiment while getting to grips with the building, texturing and planting techniques that would be used later, throughout the course.
Next, I started on hole number 2, a strong '3 shot' par 5. As you can see, I seem to be going backwards and maybe there's something in that. I often start reading books in the middle and if I like what I read, I'll gradually work my way back to the start before continuing on to the finish. I'm sure a psychologist would have a field day with me at this point and come up with the reason why I tend to do things this way. If any psychology experts are reading, please leave a note - I'm all ears haha!!

Come to think of it, I'm doing it again by just writing this blog, the course is halfway complete and here I am at the start again............ very odd indeed!