A good first publish! Lot of good ideas here. Your greens are really well done, in terms of movement and speed/firmness/pin placement. Really enjoyed the greens. And I really like your hole routings on many of your holes - really unique and provides a lot of interest in terms of options and variety. And I love your use of grass around many of your greens, very natural looking and pretty. LOVE the volcano cone visible from #17 and #18 in the distance! You've got a great eye for aesthetics and a great feel for strategy in your hole designs. A fun and very challenging course.
A few of my suggestions below:
-Remember the "can it be mowed?" theory. I.e., some of the edges of your fairway and greens are contoured very steeply. Some flattening/smoothing with the soft fuzzy round brush would make these look better and more natural.
-Some disparate elements are present, like the massive rock next to #3 tee/#2 green, or the 2 rocks at the landing area on the #9 fairway. These looks really out of place. If it was of a theme - lots of large natural rocks worked in all over - it would make more sense.
-Most of your hole routings look great, but a couple of them still seem somewhat auto-gen, albeit tweaked. Maybe you already know this, but if not: when starting out, set all your designer sliders to none. I'm quoting TasteGW (a super-talented designer) here:
"set green size slider to smallest
set fairway width slider to none
set bunker hazards slider to none (both greenside and fairway)
set light rough slider to none
set heavy rough slider to none
set tee size slider to none (this has to be done for each hole)."
-Then create all of your design elements from scratch - fairways/greens/bunkers. You can either go the route of using stock shapes in combination, or the 100% custom route (like Taste and many others do). I can see you mostly did this all over your course, but not all of it. If you want to auto-gen trees/plants/hills/water, go for it, and then delete/adjust as you desire.
-Cart path routing is excellent, but needs smoothed and flattened. See below for some excellent design videos on doing this well.
-Bunker contouring is good, but can be even better. Again, see video link below for the best methods on bunkering.
-Just my own aesthetic taste, but your bunkers are the exact shade as your cart paths; these 2 separate design elements seem the same visually as a result, kind of disconcerting to the eye IMO. I'd make sure they are different shades in the future. Just my opinion though.
-Your contouring - both on and off the course - are really good for your first course, but there are places that need some attention, like a few teeboxes that slope sharply off the sides or back on their edges, and fairways with huge slopes just off the 1st cut. Also, several teeshots are blind due to terrain humps in front of them, which could easily be fixed by a bit of contouring of the terrain between the teebox and the fairway, or raising your teeboxes up a bit and smoothing the terrain a bit around them. A few of the transitions between fairway and green are extremely harsh in terms of elevation (#12 is one example). These could be smoothed with the soft fuzzy circle brush to be more natural looking, and play better on the approaches. Again, paying attention to contouring of the terrain on/off the course makes a huge difference in how a course looks. Once again - I refer to the videos below for some great tutorials on contouring/sculpting.
-Many of your transitions between cuts - around the greens/teeboxes mostly but a few fairways too - are jagged and chunky. This is a common thing that can happen when applying textures and can be easily fixed when laying down your fairway/green shapes, see the video links below for the best methods to avoid this, and give all your greens/fairways a really nice clean look.
-A few fairways have gaps in the 2nd cut (#15 being one) - there will be surrounding light rough for a stretch of the fairway, and then it suddenly is missing and it goes directly to heavy rough. Not sure if this was an oversight or intentional, but it looks odd and non-uniform.
-You've got a sign in the middle of the fairway on #18 just before the green (" Please keep carts 15 feet from greens"). Not sure if this was intentional or not, I'm thinking not
Excellent instructional videos:
-Bunkering (by TasteGW):
Bunkering-Basic hole design from scratch (by TasteGW):
Hole Design-Full series of course design lessons (by CrazyCanuck):
Course Design Series (this is Lesson #1, all of the other lessons are accessible from this video).
-Study some of the other great courses out there by Reebdog, TasteGW, Griff, Coruler, CrazyCanuck, Hootbleet, UnH0lyone, and so many of the other talented designers too numerous to mention. Observing their courses in detail is sometimes the best lessons you can ask for.
None of the above is intended to be negative, and none of it is written-in-stone dogma. Lots of different methods/approaches to using the GNCD tool, and obviously a lot will change with TGC2, but these are some basic design fundamentals that - once you master them - will serve as a good foundation. I'm sure others will have much better advice than mine to add to this to really help you grow as a designer.
You obviously have a great eye for course design and golf strategy, and I'm looking forward to seeing your next courses! Keep up the good work!
Cheers