Using LIDAR DEM for Real Courses

[Stephen Sullivan]

Great to hear that you´re doing better. Out of curiosity, which courses in particular did you have in mind?

I normally find something to use as substitutes for events, but it would be nice to have some real ones along the following lines :

The Renaissance Club, North Berwick, Scotland. Home of the Genesis Scottish Open

Regnum Carya Golf & Spa Resort, Antalya, Turkey. Home of the Turkish Open

Yas Links, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Home of the Abu Dhabi Championship

[linkster]

Stephen - the courses you mentioned have peaked my interest as well but I couldn't find any lidar data for them, except for Renaissance Club. The Scotland lidar data available only has partial coverage of the course - very frustrating!

RobV - I get confused on how the newer 3d software do things relative to the APCD so I guess it is relative to what you are used to using! I have never used course forge for unity so I can't tell you the differences. The main annoyance with the APCD is that there are no global editing features that work well for adding course textures to the terrain. You have to get in there and move each vert or turn edges for the faces.

The biggest concept to grasp for getting lidar into the APCD is to "simplify" the terrain down to a vert count the APCD can handle. Lidar DEM's are normally .tif files that are 1m x 1m in pixel size. QGIS is used to "sample" the terrain heights at another pixel size (could be 2m or 5m etc) and then convert the .tif file to the old .dem file that the APCD accepts. The other half of the course terrain is geo referencing a satellite image to match the lidar elevations.