I'm currently doing my best to recreate Jack Nicklaus's Miurfield Village course.
The water (elevation) tool is probably the biggest hurdle so far.
For the most part I'm just getting the distance and shape of the hole right. Then working to get as close as I can get with the bunker / hazard locations. The tools don't always lend themselves to a perfect recreation, but I'm liking how it looks so far having the first 3 holes completed.
I'm going to try to do my local course. It's hard... I'm using the measure tool in google maps satellite data to layout the rough width and length of the fairways and greens, and then using the mesaure tool in the designer to lay out those exact same distances.
I'm trying to get a handle on using splines to lay out the fairways, but it's tough enough.
For me, though, the biggest hurdle is in getting nice rolling undulations in the fairway and just general elevation work that doesn't look janky. Also my local course has thick walls brush all around, and I'm not sure I can do that with the tools provided.
I had set up the course using pre-generated holes and just moving the waypoints around which helps but I feel like it's less accurate than starting from scratch. I was able to set up the entire basic layout in two hours using the pre-generated stuff but when working from scratch it took me two hours to do half of one hole.
There's no doubt that it's a stunning tool, though. Some of the things people are making in tutorial vids are amazing. Someone has used the new skyscraper models you can place to make a par 3 course with the tees and greens on the ceilings of different skyscrapers. Amazing.
Can you explain that putting stuff more? I'm not sure I get it.
The marker tells the game what distance you're trying to hit the ball. If you get close to that distance with the length of your putt swing, the game will say that you basically DID get that distance.
So if you set your distance to 20 feet and do a swing that would be 22 feet, the game will make it so that the ball goes 20.5 feet or thereabouts. Because it's hard to get distance right in the game, they basically made it so that if you get 'close' the game makes it so that you get it 'near-perfect'.
The long putter goes from 0-160 feet. That means there's an absolute ton of variance in the amount of distance you can put on putts. That makes a system like this that says 'close enough' very important.
