Black Diamond Ranch (Quarry)

[MikeB]

The course has been processed. I quickly flattened the tee boxes and gave it a go. A lot of fun.

Holes 14, 15, and 16 circle an old quarry. 14 is an odd par 5 that tees off perpendicular to the fairway. 15 is what got me to settle on doing this course start to finish (pic included).

The object meter is already at 50% with no trees and a lot of the mask edited out in red. This might take awhile. Btw, anyone else have slowness issues in the designer with lidar courses? Seems like each edit takes longer to render than editing a non-lidar course with 50% full object meter.

[Deleted]

Black Diamond Quarry course is such a cool one. Really looking forward to it!

Edits do take longer with lidar courses, it's just the nature of the beast.

[MikeB]

Hole 14 under construction

[MikeB]

Finally got back into this a few weeks ago. It is nearly done. Pins are tough on some greens to find 4 spots without yellow in the 9-box area. I've tested pins 1 and 2 on Fast greens. 2 to go and this will be ready to publish, hopefully by Friday.

Some notes of what I've done:
1. Imported mostly just the course from lidar. No trees. The file size if I did more area was huge and ate the entire plant meter. Had to blend about 50% of the map up to the edges with the red brushes. This alone took a week. I think that's why i put this down for a long time. Seemed like a daunting task.

2. Painted all the heavy rough with brushes, filled in gaps with splines. There are few pics of the first 12 holes so i had to watch videos and use Google Earth a ton. Tried to limit any squiggly rough edges.

3. Redid some bunkers. I'll find the dude that posted painting in bunkers with brushes to get the skinny areas of rough running between. Huge help on 2 bunkers that went from bland to nice.

4. Both quarries are entirely hand-planted. #13 to #17 are "the 5 best holes in the world." I guess they mean the best consecutive 5. So my main focus was doing them justice.

5. I wanted this to be playable with little to no lag. I knew the majority of the planting would be in the quarries. There are a lot of homes on the course but I left them out. It was either use up the plant meter on buildings, or focus on the quarries. Couldn't do both. I thought doing half of the homes would look weird. I might start adding some that are in view and see if it works.

6. Decided on Delta theme for the trees. The quarry looked amazing in Highland, but not having the auto-gen background trees was a deal breaker. I used some rocks to highlight the quarry walls. The heavy rough would have blended better but the course does have more brown spots around trees that wouldn't have looked the same in Highland.

[MikeB]

1. #13 par 3
2. #12 green, looking into first quarry
3. #13 and #17, with 2nd quarry in the back
4. #14 green, an extremely short par 5
5. View across quarry from #14 tee
6. #14 tee
7. Looking into quarry at #15
8. #17 long par 3
9. #2 on left, #8 on right, and #9 in the back

[jwfickett]

Looks really good. This is a Fazio funhouse IRL. Can't wait to see the finished product.

[Doyley]

Remember playing this one alot in PGA Championship 1999. Be fun to play it again!

[sandsaver01]

This looks real close to the real thing Mike! I have played this track IRL (as well as the Ranch course) several times in FSGA One Day events. The greens are definitely a bear and they always keep them quick. I actually had looked up the Lidar data for the course and saw that you had done the OSM so I did not proceed farther, but you have done it proud!