Pga West stadium course

[sagevanni]

JC,
Sounds good to me......................I'll make contact with Linkster about the lidar data.

Sage......

[leftybob]

Thank you Adelade for your comment and thank you Sage and big sexy JC for at least thinking about being Willing to take on the challenge of doing PGA West stadium course redo.
Pete, first of all I am not a newbie. I was on forum many years ago but have not posted for years. Secondly, I have played links since it first came out over 20 years ago.
I play mostly in Link's career ,trying to replicate the PGA tour using all of the courses available from the links course directory .
And I have played all of those courses which you mentioned. I agree that Robert Miller does outstanding work.
Secondly, even if I was a newbie ,not sure what your point is?. I wasn't" expecting " these people to make a course for "me".... And me alone.
I was not complaining.
I was just asking if anyone would be interested in doing it, ,since as the comments have shown, others are also interested in playing these courses.
I have no talent, nor interest, in trying to do these courses. I tried many years ago and found it very frustrating. So I do appreciate how much effort and work ,and yes talent ,goes into re-creating these courses
Thanks again to those of you who might be willing to take this on

[Colin Jones]

Pete,

But it only takes 500 or so hours to do a course.

I think those are Sagehours.
Although I am getting faster at completing a course, it takes me closer to 800+ hours.

Never really thought before about how many hours Ian. It's interesting, I might log 'em next time. I estimate that Mauna Kea was about 600 hours. But, given I already had 13 holes of a non-Lidar version of MK completed (but then abandoned), I reckon you have to add in another minimum 400 hours for total project time.

1,000+ hours - what was I thinking?!

How much time do you think having a Lidar DEM saves you?

Story - My second course after Redstone was TPC Louisiana. It was early days so I reckon at least 800 hours as I was nearing the end of it. Lo and behold, our very own Glenn Braden then releases his latest course - TPC Louisiana! I was beyond horrified. Glenn doesn't know of this (until he reads this post!) : All those hundreds of hours just wasted.............

[linkster]

I got a head start on this course request and gave Sage the DEM import files. I managed to fit both the Dye Stadium course and the Nicklaus Tournament course on the same 3m DEM plot.

PGA_West_Dye_Stadium1.jpg (142.36 KiB) Viewed 7484 times

PGA_West_Dye_Stadium2.jpg (483.95 KiB) Viewed 7484 times

Interesting that this course request came up at this time since the USGS just released the lidar point files for a 2021 survey only 2 weeks ago! Before this I would not have been able to provide a hi-res DEM.

I had to generate the raster DEM in Cloud Compare first before doing the work in QGIS so this import took about 4 hours to complete which is a little longer than usual. Hi-res DEM's can produce some awesome course accuracy but there is still a lot of time necessary to "complete" the course for game play. If I do a lower vert count DEM the course can be produced much faster but at the cost of accuracy. Simply going to a 5m DEM is 2.77 times less verts and greatly speeds up the terrain process of finishing a course but there is a noticeable loss in accuracy. I would be interested in what everyone thinks is the best balance between accuracy and completion speed.

[Colin Jones]

I had to generate the raster DEM in Cloud Compare first before doing the work in QGIS so this import took about 4 hours to complete which is a little longer than usual. Hi-res DEM's can produce some awesome course accuracy but there is still a lot of time necessary to "complete" the course for game play. If I do a lower vert count DEM the course can be produced much faster but at the cost of accuracy. Simply going to a 5m DEM is 2.77 times less verts and greatly speeds up the terrain process of finishing a course but there is a noticeable loss in accuracy. I would be interested in what everyone thinks is the best balance between accuracy and completion speed.

Firstly, I would NEVER design another course without one of your DEMs. But, the many fine details you need to add that I believe make a course stand out by catching the eye of the player at every possible vantage point is, by far, the most time-consuming part of design for me. The time and effort taken to do that is no different whether it's a 1M DEM or having no DEM at all.

For me, general design time is all about the bunkers and greens.

MK and Sydney are both 3M DEMs. For MK, I "gutted" the internals of the bunkers and then completed each one manually. I used the minimum internal vert height at 2-3 strategic points (obviously recorded prior to their deletion) to set my levels for doing so. The detailed green contours you provided often gave me very accurate information about the depth of greenside bunkers. For Sydney, I have relied more on the original DEM and built each bunker around those levels. That was quicker, obviously, but I believe the MK bunkers to be a little superior.

For greens, I also gutted the internal verts and used the detailed contour maps instead. As we now know, it can be counter-productive to produce greens with 1,000 verts - as I did originally. You can get extremely accurate greens without going to so much trouble. I will be much easier on myself next time!

I would imagine that 1M would produce so many verts that would just get "in the way" of design. It would probably be slightly nightmarish to work at that level. But, given the way I design, I think 2M is where we could start.

A recent DEM you provided me is 5M, which is the best available for that course. Completely happy with that because it's a very famous Australian course and a Top 20 world course. For that, I make a "concession" for a course I REALLY want to do. Can also get information from other sources to make the greens and other points super accurate. And what's the concession really? A 5M DEM is still awesome resolution, far better than anything we've seen previously, up to a few months ago!

I'll say it again - the work you are doing and the change you have made to the game is amazing! Thanks so much again.

[Adelade]

I spent a whole 9 months working on only pre-elevations for Nine Bridges, due to a very low amount of elevation information being available. The results of those 9 months can be seen as very equivalent to what a LIDAR DEM would produce in terms of furthering the design process. In other words, if there had been LIDAR data and I had had a DEM import, I would have straight up saved 9 months. That is just crazy, especially when thinking back at how mad it drove me to go through all that trouble. Sure, I know LIDAR DEMs require some fiddling afterwards but the elevations I made by hand also resulted in later fiddling in other ways. Nine Bridges was definitely an extra tricky case, so Im certainly not saying LIDAR DEMs would shave off 9 months on any course, it would be much less in most cases, and of course that also depends on how many hours are put in per week. Im just saying, in some cases it really could make a huge, huge difference. I dont think LIDAR data will be available for Nine Bridges in particular anytime soon, but Im just trying to make a point about how much LIDAR could help in some cases.

I would be interested in hearing Ian's perspective on how much time it saves, as he has been producing courses one by one and at a relatively steady (and impressive, for that matter) pace both before and after LIDAR. Only going by months between releases (which isnt necessarily a good measure), he produced 3 LIDAR courses in 20 months (average about 6.7 months) while the last 2 of his non-LIDAR courses were average about 8.7 months. Time certainly isnt everything when it comes to APCD efforts, but I do think it can be an interesting discussion.

[braden1308]

Pete,

But it only takes 500 or so hours to do a course.

I think those are Sagehours.
Although I am getting faster at completing a course, it takes me closer to 800+ hours.

Never really thought before about how many hours Ian. It's interesting, I might log 'em next time. I estimate that Mauna Kea was about 600 hours. But, given I already had 13 holes of a non-Lidar version of MK completed (but then abandoned), I reckon you have to add in another minimum 400 hours for total project time.

1,000+ hours - what was I thinking?!

How much time do you think having a Lidar DEM saves you?

Story - My second course after Redstone was TPC Louisiana. It was early days so I reckon at least 800 hours as I was nearing the end of it. Lo and behold, our very own Glenn Braden then releases his latest course - TPC Louisiana! I was beyond horrified. Glenn doesn't know of this (until he reads this post!) : All those hundreds of hours just wasted.............

Colin, I didn't know that. You should have released it anyway!

[Ian Wells]

How much time do you think having a Lidar DEM saves you?

When I built my first real course, Wade Hampton, I used both Goggle Earth and contour maps from USGS(?) and it took me an age (closer to 2000 hours -, I estimate), but seeing a 3D course emerge from a flat plot was immensely pleasurable and gave me a real feeling of achievement.

My other non-Lidar courses also gave me pleasure, but building courses from Lidar does not give me the same pleasure. I still enjoy building the courses and I am proud of what I have achieved with them, but it is not the same. Does that mean I will return to non-Lidar?

I stopped working on Crooked Stick (non-Lidar) to build Mountaintop as soon as Linkster offered to give me a download. When Mountaintop was completed and I returned to Crooked Stick, I found it extremely difficult to return to a plot where I had to look-up the elevations on Google Earth and transpose that into APCD. I therefore asked Linkster for a Lidar download of Crooked Stick and started again. Will I return to non-Lidar, I think not.

Building a course from Lidar is different from non-Lidar, and I am still learning, and will continue to learn, just as I am still learning from using APCD, so hopefully I will be able to complete courses more quickly.

Generally, I would say that using Lidar DEM download saves time on a course build, but where you save time on elevations you lose time on editing the vast number of vertices and edges. Lidar is quicker, especially when there are large changes in elevation, but not so as much as I originally thought it would.

However, the best reason for using a Lidar download is that the final product is so much better and far more realistic.

Ian

[Jimbo]

Just wondering where the PGA West (Palmer) Beta course fits in? It's definitely not the same as La Quinta...and the La Quinta course doesn't have a picture.

[doclawler]

Glad to see pmgolf is the only jerk on the forum. Somebody pops on here and asks politely about whether anyone is thinking of updating a well known course that hasn't been touched in 25 years and he spouts off like he is God's gift to the links community. Bravo, pmgolf. Meanwhile several of the real designers on the forum immediately chime in and do what they do best, set about working on a course that many people would apparently be interested in seeing.