Smoothing Lidar greens

[sandsaver01]

I have done two Lidar courses and am halfway through a third. I did essentially no green smoothing on Crooked Stick, and only on a couple of holes on Old White. I did it on those because the artifacts were obvious. I have been reluctant to smooth lidar greens because I do try to maintain the topography as close to rl as possible - otherwise why have Lidar right? After a number of comments about the greens on the Lidar course we just played in CC-Pro, golf Club de Alcanada (I thought it was a great course - not dissing the designer), I am wondering whether I should re-think my anti-smoothing bias. As it turns out the greens on my WIP Sand Hills GC seem pretty reasonable, very few obvious "lidar breaks", so I may not need to do much on that course.

What I am interested in is your input as designers and lidar users as to the best way to do the smoothing. I assume using the "fuzzy brush", but how big, where, etc.? Thanks for your help.

[Deleted]

I have my own smoothing method for data artifacts. It's pretty time consuming, but in the end result all it really does is polish out the inconsistencies without actually changing the green breaks. I did this first on Canyata as I didn't want its greens to look like this course. Now it's 'standard procedure' for me on LiDAR courses. I was not a fan of this for a while because I felt it was mainly done to make sure the course could play on 15+ stimp (187) but neither of the courses I did this extensively on can play on that speed without yellow pins or significantly reduced pinnible green area. That changes the macro-contours, which I won't do on LiDAR courses unless I have clear evidence that they're wrong, or if the contours make so little sense that some changes can be partially assumed correct. And in those instances, almost never with the flatten brush.

What I do is I take the fuzzy flatten brush, make it as small as it goes, and generally stick to absolute 0ft 0 unless I can't obtain the right change with it. Then, wherever the lines aren't smooth in their transitions (abrupt changes in how steep or not the contour lines are) I go over those spots to smooth them out. I have done this in a couple places on my fictional course and have one small general guideline I use: much of the time if the micro-break is just a bump or depression I use the flatten brush mostly around it to pull it down or up as needed. This method has resulted in some pretty smooth LiDAR greens from originally lumpy sources (but nowhere near VicNat territory, this wouldn't be good for that as my method is more for fine-tuning).

If the greens are supposed to be all lumpy and bumpy and you're working on a course with plenty of pictures available, the pictures will show it.

[sandsaver01]

Thanks Adam. Like I said I don't think I will need to do much smoothing on Sand Hills, and I am going to wait on better Lidar for Vic Nat, but I probably should have done more on Crooked Stick and Old White. It sounds like your approach is solid though maybe a bit tedious.

[Deleted]

The only reason I decided it was worth it on Canyata, at least for the greens, is that every golfer plays on the greens no matter what. And as we have all seen with CC Pro this week, 'if the greens are bumpy the course sucks.' Anywhere else on the course, micro-artifacts are not nearly as important to fix imho. I'm also a bit of a sucker for really smooth green contours, and you'll find that applies on my fictional stuff as well when the time comes. If preserving the contours doesn't matter to you, it's easy to get results in a fraction of the time.

For Canyata I was not only just learning the tools (and this method) but I also didn't even know you could click left stick to reset the cursor...so every time I had to deviate from absolute 0 I did play-test to reset With that included and those greens needing more attention than Black Rock's in this regard, I think I averaged around 40-45min per green on that course. Black Rock had fewer of those artifacts and more macro-scale ones, so I did rebuild small portions of a couple greens based on pictures I was able to find. Aside from that, I probably averaged 20min per green with this method smoothing out the contours. If you're curious to see what the difference is, you can try my bsbr10 beta and compare it to the front 9 of either finished version. I did not publish a beta for Canyata but if you want, I could show you how I did those greens on stream sometime.

If you try this method, there will be some times you have to deviate from 0ft0, there may also be a couple spots where flatten doesn't quite work for some odd reason so you can switch over to raise for that.

With rebuilding portions of Black Rock's greens I'd put the time estimate there for all green work at around 10hrs or so, and Canyata probably took more like 12-14hrs for the greens. Since the courses play better as a result, I think it's time well spent. If the greens on Sand Hills are really good they're probably still worth checking carefully just to make sure, but it might just be a few hours (or less) then.