Caldera Furiosa - Rookie Design Contest WIP by Lifeonaboard

[Lifeonaboard]

I've been looking forward to this contest for a couple of weeks now and have had time to think through what I think will be an interesting and memorable golf course. Caldera Furiosa is set in an old but maybe not entirely dormant caldera which should make for some long sight lines and interesting elevation changes as well as several distinctly different areas to discover. This image gives a general idea of the layout looking down off of the ridge towards the central crater lake. I have a bunch of interesting visual ideas for the Steppe theme that I look forward to sharing later in development once they are ready. Since I am very new to the TGC community I have had little to no feedback on any of my design work yet (I have only released 2 courses and have several others in various stages of development) so I am looking forward to hearing any thoughts other designers might have. Good luck to everyone else competing, I look forward to playing lots of excellent courses!

[Riotous]

Good luck! Love the elevation you’ve got there, looks like you’ve 3/4 holes already sorted you’ll be finished by mid August!!!

[Lifeonaboard]

Aug 3, 2019 10:18:46 GMT -5 Riotous said:

Good luck! Love the elevation you’ve got there, looks like you’ve 3/4 holes already sorted you’ll be finished by mid August!!!

Haha, I wish I could work that quickly. I was really hoping to have my 3rd course released when this contest started but planting and testing just drags on for weeks.

[acesgalore]

Aug 3, 2019 5:05:20 GMT -5 Lifeonaboard said:

I've been looking forward to this contest for a couple of weeks now and have had time to think through what I think will be an interesting and memorable golf course. Caldera Furiosa is set in an old but maybe not entirely dormant caldera which should make for some long sight lines and interesting elevation changes as well as several distinctly different areas to discover. This image gives a general idea of the layout looking down off of the ridge towards the central crater lake. I have a bunch of interesting visual ideas for the Steppe theme that I look forward to sharing later in development once they are ready. Since I am very new to the TGC community I have had little to no feedback on any of my design work yet (I have only released 2 courses and have several others in various stages of development) so I am looking forward to hearing any thoughts other designers might have. Good luck to everyone else competing, I look forward to playing lots of excellent courses!

That's a solid looking start.

[Lifeonaboard]

Thanks acesgalore! I've made a decent amount of progress the last couple of days so I will try to post another teaser pic tonight.

[Lifeonaboard]

Yesterday I completely overhauled the routing on the back nine to utilize the space a bit better and fix a couple of design problems I wasn't happy with. Today I tested out a few different hole designs for 9 and 12 which I feel pretty happy with. As promised here are a couple more pictures.

Here is some of the initial planting on the 11th green surround:

And here is the first draft of the green on hole 9 (Ignore HUD). It is easily the most ridiculous green design I've tried but so far plays pretty well:

[welikeitroughnc]

Rotate and resize on the trees ... they’re your friend. That 9th hole with the contrast looks good and actually pops nicely. Can’t comment about the green as I’m not in your head but I may consider rethinking it a bit and trying to make it flow together a bit better. But that said I love the color contrast

[Lifeonaboard]

Aug 6, 2019 4:22:50 GMT -5 welikeitroughnc said:

Rotate and resize on the trees ... they’re your friend. That 9th hole with the contrast looks good and actually pops nicely. Can’t comment about the green as I’m not in your head but I may consider rethinking it a bit and trying to make it flow together a bit better. But that said I love the color contrast

Thanks for the thoughts. For the 11th approach I think I will have to raise the fairway(where the golfer is) so that there is more room for variations in the planting without blocking the view of the green. Right now most of those dead trees are as small as they can go and they're still a little too tall for my liking. Hopefully that should fix it. As for the 9th green I do plan on doing a lot more shaping on it but it will probably still be pretty divisive as there will be some situations where you will have to chip off of the green to get to the hole. So far my design philosophy for these greens is to make them fairly large but with only 2 or 3 smaller areas on the green that are flat enough for placing pins. There are several reasons I think this style of green should work on this course.

1: I plan to only use the light rough to frame other surfaces. This means there will be very few safe places to miss the green, so having the green as a larger target should help.
2: It should mean I can get away with some much bolder contours on the greens than usual, making the greens fit into the surrounding terrain better and providing some pretty crazy sweeping long putts.
3: It will put a premium on hitting the right part of the green as birdies will be highly unlikely from the wrong part of the green. It would also offer plenty of variety between pin sets.

With that in mind the 9th green at the moment is designed to play as 3 separate greens that happen to be connected. This wouldn't work on many types of holes but since hole 9 here is pretty massive in scale I think it suits it nicely as each different pin location requires you to choose the optimal route to get a clean approach shot at the hole. That being said I do need to make some changes since at the moment it seems like a waste to have them connected without utilizing that space to allow some epic long putts between some of the sections. I'll have to mess around with this later once I have more holes laid down.

If anyone out there has any insights on making this style of green I would love to hear them.

[Riotous]

I’m hopeless at greens, so I’ll be watching for an answer too!

[b101]

So, I would watch this:



Go from the 20 minute mark for Matt's take on green sizes - it'll answer most of your questions and some you hadn't thought about yet

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You CAN by all means go for very bold, daring greens that are quite large with smaller playable areas, but it's tougher to pull off than you think. For the best examples, look at RJWils30's courses, notably Falling Water or New Highlands Dunes 2019 (although, those are both depressingly good, so don't play them if you might be intimidated!).

Just because it's easier to explain your own stuff: I went for a couple of big greens on Ganglesee (tgctours.proboards.com/thread/19803/nglesee-golf-club-cc-contest) - my CC course. Some worked really well - the 2nd/3rd/9th/18th - note that most of those were par fives or had lots of undulations in the landscape where the hole sat and some not so much (1st, 7th). 17 was a bit iffy, but just about works given the length of approach and how the green is sectioned, I think. The key is whether it fits with the hole. Do you NEED a big green for the approach shot? And do your bold slopes fit with the rest of the landscape? I.e. if you have massive slopes on the green, I'd expect dunes around them and bumpy fairways as well. It's got to make sense, basically...

[Lifeonaboard]

After seeing all the work that everyone else is doing, I thought I was due for an update as well. I have a playable 18 holes now but 3 or 4 of them I find pretty mediocre so will redo them when inspiration strikes. I've re-routed holes 13-16 again, hopefully for the last time. This was to use the space better and to change the lighting. I've spent a lot of time playtesting and tweaking the greens. The bold contours are mostly working how I want but I will probably have to adjust them to balance the difficulty as I get a better feel for the course as one cohesive experience. Thanks to everyone for your input on the subject, I found it all very useful and I hope it translates into a really fun course. Also b101 you are right about New Highland Dunes 2019. It is an awesome experience with some pretty crazy greens that work great, really good inspiration. I have done very little planting until now as I really wanted to get the design of each hole pretty close to finalized before spending much time on it. All the empty space is starting to get to me though so I thought I would try to get at least 1 hole planted just to remind myself what a finished course looks like. So here are a few pictures from hole 8. You can see from the backgrounds most of the course is still pretty barren but we still have lots of time left. This also might be the only hole without a bunker.

[welikeitroughnc]

Just my 2c but some larger rocks sunk in to kind of break up small rocks laying all around would look nice, heavily planted with grasses and a few bushes mixed in. Looking awesome thus far but all those tiny rocks are a bit off putting without a balance

[b101]

As a major plus, you've done that cart path really well in terms of how it frames the playable area. It's a really clever way to deal with the planting issues in desert/steppe and I can't imagine many rookies would pull that off - kudos to you there! I like it. Just make sure you flatten the tee boxes with one of the first three brushes. Eager to see what you produce

[Riotous]

Wow, we have a contender!! Great look. Just be careful where you put the pins, that’s an undulating green.. Looking forward to seeing the rest

[Davidius74]

Looks really good I'm just not sold on the brown light rough. Green fairway/greens, darker green heavy rough but the strip of brown between them is a bit off putting. Yes it frames everything and provides a contrast it just doesn't seem right to me. Everything else is great though and as welikeit said, some larger rocks sunken into ground between the smaller rocks will break them up a bit.