Finding a style

It's early December 2008 and my course exists only in my head - onwards!

In the real design world, the terrain on which the course sits and it's vegetation is unique. Not so in the virtual world where everyone's prospective masterpiece starts of the same - flat and very, very green!

So my first task was look for a course location and style which inspired me. I've long been a fan of golf designers, Coore and Crenshaw who have over the years designed some classic and unusual courses. They have recently been criticised, unfairly in my mind, for making their courses look too similar to each other. I think that's a ridiculous comment when you consider the varied terrain they have build their courses on. Few people could mistake their Nebraska course 'Sand Hills' for anywhere else.

Of course they have their own style which they take from course to course but I've yet to hear anyone complain after playing one of their courses!

I was taken with one of their more recent courses named 'Old Sandwich' which is in Massachusetts on the east coast of the United States. I loved it's rolling terrain, pine trees and whispy grasses which are punctuated with wild bluberry bushes which can be seen throughout the course.

http://www.osgolfclub.com/Club/Scripts/public/public.asp

It really does look like a wonderful course.

This looked exactly like the kind of course I'd like to design and so I set about the task of creating textures, making planting sets for the grasses and vegetation and practicing various techniques that I would need in order to create my course. That one sentence seems innocuous enough but I can assure you, many weeks of photoshop creation and experiments ensued and are still ongoing although I have a good set of 'work in progress' stuff to be going on with. I was, at that time, using an old version of one of my early 2003 creations 'Shadowlands' to experiment on and thus dug this practice bunker right in the middle of the first fairway!

I showed this pic around to a few friends and after a very positive response, decided that I was ready to begin work on my course in earnest.

Inspiration

After a lot of success and aclaim in making virtual courses for first Links 2001 and then later, Links 2003, I found myself being contacted by various real golf design companies and developers who wanted me to provide photorealistic pictures and 'flyby's' of their planned new courses, renovations and redesigns.

Since getting my start with Kevin Atkinson at Phelps/Atkinson golf design, I've been fortunate enough to have been able to work with some of the biggest names in the golf design business including Greg Norman's course design company, Fazio design, Robert Trent Jones II, David Kidd golf design, Tim Liddy design and many more.
I can't tell you how much I've learned both about the finer points of golf design and also about the more down to earth aspects such as budgeting, construction and environmental issues that real designers must deal with on each design.

It's been a few years since I put that knowledge to good use on any of my own personal designs but that's about to change. I'm in the process of designing and building a brand new course for Links which I hope will be the best I've ever created. So why now?

Although the last of the Links series of golf games/sims produced for the PC was way back in 2003, constant patches and updates have been produced by Mark Hulka (one of the original 'Links' programmers)and the team at apcd-courses.com led my Mick Prendergast and Andrew Jones. Their passion for the game of golf and links in particular has ensured that even by todays standards, the visuals and gameplay are still second to none. There have also been recent significant additions which now allow the use of much higher resolution textures to be used in the making of courses in the 'apcd' (the cad based tool used for creating courses for Links).

Several designers notably Rob Miller, have used these new opportunities to take the game to new heights of visual fidelity. Rob's renditions of great courses such as Pinehurst no.2, Shinnecock and Bethpage Black (co designed with Domonic Bois) have raised the bar on what is possible. Over the last few years I've developed a good friendship with Rob and after doing much playing and testing on his courses and giving my input on where I felt things could be improved even further, I came to the decision to put my knowledge and skills into creating a brand new course of my own. Several close friends offered encouragement and so my mind was made up!

I lost no time and immediately set about researching the kind of course I would create, it's geographical location and it's style. I've made my name in virtual course creation and visualization by striving to create courses that are fun to play, look natural but more than that - courses that look 'REAL' I also wanted to create a course that would appeal to all standards of player be they an absolute expert or a comparative novice.

I'd like this blog to give an insight into the process of creating a brand new course from scratch and with hindsight I would have started to write it before any work had begun. As it's turned out' I'm already well into the design process but over the next few weeks I'll be blogging about what has been done so far, what is being done now and what is still to be done in the future. I hope that following this blog will be worth your time!

First blog!

Well this blogging thing is all new to me but I thought I'd give it a shot. A quick hello to all my old friends from 'links corner' and 'apcd-courses.com' I hope this blog will provide a little bit of insight into the process of making a virtual course - in this case specifically for Microsoft Links.

I hope you enjoy the ride!