CSU's Design Tips #2 - Creating a "Natural" Looking Green
Nov 12, 2018 13:25:08 GMT -5
coruler2, Crazycanuck1985, and 6 more like this
Post by csugolfer60 on Nov 12, 2018 13:25:08 GMT -5
CSU's Design Tips #2 - Creating a "Natural" Looking Green
Hi everyone, this is a quick step-by-step guide on how to create natural, modern green complex. This is my method, and by no means the only way of doing it, but it will generally produce some good looking results.
Generally, green sites are good when they have a natural "high" top to them. They look more natural due to what we normally see on real golf courses - better grass higher, and wetter, not so good grass lower. So you can see I've picked out a natural green site here, with the bonus of good lighting casting shadows from behind. You can pretty much "see" the shape of the green without even having any green grass down yet. You can also see that the swale to the left doesn't look to friendly - a good spot for a bunker.
So, we start by laying down a spline of green, and filling it in. You can see the edges of the spline are pretty rough, and the terrain is very jagged.
So, to smooth it out, we take the "gradient spot brush", and go around with about a 10-foot diameter, all the way around the edge and smooth it out. Use the "flattening" tool, with no elevation change.
Next, we're going to make a fairway spline. Take it on top of the fringe, so that it is most accurately following the shape of the green. Some designers (or even on other courses of mine) will use no fairway around the edge of the green, in which case you can skip this step and go onto the next.
And one more time, smooth it out. We also can notice that the swale to the left is taking shape as a bunker, even without any sand there yet. So lets go ahead and put something in there.
I almost always use the penninsula bunker brush, pictured below, just because the scale of it seems to fit very well. It's also very versatile, fitting into corners of greens. A good rule of thumb is to make sure your green generally bends around this shape, as it fits into a nice curve. Any steeper curves tend to look very sharp. Generally, it also looks better if the "tounge" of the bunker is facing the player from the approach, to break up the monotony of the bunker sand. It also provides a nice opportunity to add a shadow in the tongue.
The bunker has a few jagged and misaligned edges, so lets take the round brush and smooth out the edges to fit the curve of the green more.
So now we're nearly done. But, it looks like that bunker could use a little shaping - the left side looks much more depressed compared to the right side. Generally, you want to maintain a consistent depression depth and edge look to make sure everything looks like it blends well.
This is just one way to do this, but what I'm going to do is take the third flattening brush, and place it about 6 inches from the bunker edge, and flatten the edge up. This creates a sharper lip, and gives you good control over the finer elevations of each section of lip.
You can see how the edge raises up due to the flatten, and creates a more attractive shadow and face.
After going around the edges, lets take the soft gradient brush and apply a flatten, and de-elevate the inside so the face is steeper, but the bottom is flatter.
Much better - but now we have a problem on the right side of that bunker, with an un-even edge and some "dead space" between the bunker and green. Lets take care of that now.
Take the small brush, and apply a bump all the way down the line of grass, between the rough and bunker.
And there it is - a finished, simple green complex, all done in about 10 minutes. And all dictated solely by the land that was there already, almost no elevating necessary.
Anyone want to share their own attempts?