PGA 2000 Mini-Tutorials : Set 2 : Question and Answer Segment
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QUESTION :

I can't for the life of me figure out how to change the panorama on my course. I can't find anything in the manual, so I'm hoping someone can point out how this is done.

ANSWER : Chris Perry

Find the panorama thumbnail in the library window, click and hold on it and drag it onto the work window.

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QUESTION :

I've been experimenting with creating edges for fringe. I can do it fairly well for tees and bunkers, but fairways are giving me problems. The problem is that whenever I seem to duplicate the fairway shape, it doesn't place it exactly on top of the original shape. so when I expand it by 3 inches, and then select both shapes, I can't use the elevation tool because the two shapes cross each other. Am I missing something here ?.

ANSWER : Chris Perry

Is the shape snapping back over the smaller shape when you make it 3 inches bigger, if so and it still doesnt work and says breaklines are crossing it may be because the fairway is such a large shape and if it is complex and has a lot of curves in it the new shape may not fit over it well after being resized.

Also I have found that when you make a new shape, there is always a second handle that is placed really close to the last handle you click to make the shape, try to delete that extra one as soon as you can, as it can cause problems on the breakline when you do elevations and when you try to duplicate and resize the shape if you leave it there, all the handles on your shapes should be evenly spaced out to avoid any problems.

And, one last thing, I have noticed that after you do major elevations if you try to use a texture to create a shape, it will not follow the edges of the shape used to make it exactly, especially if it is a complex shape to begin with, so you may find it hard to line it up properly with the other shape.

ANSWER : Alan Toft

When you duplicate a shape the architect places it off center so that you can locate and click on it. Without moving the shape select properties and expand or shrink the shape. It will then snap back to be centered on the shape if it has not been moved. Complex shapes may need some adjustment at a high zoom setting to be a good match.
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QUESTION :

How can I see texture properties in PGA 2000 ?.

ANSWER : Chris Perry

No you can't, the L/C can only load .tlb files which are used to create the eventual clb file that the course will use. Designers will not include a tlb with their course because, let's face it, there's no point, it will only add to the download size of their course, and all the artwork used is mapped to locations on the designers hard drive, meaning nothing will show up on the other user's ends.

When you open the L/C and put your textures in, double or right click on the thumbnails, and a box will come up for its properties, there will be a button that says Ball Behavior, click it and up will come a screen with yet more behavior stuff, including all the coefficients.

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QUESTION :

How do I move shapes to a different area within the designer ?.

ANSWER : Phillip Lothian

Lift all the shapes that you want to move. You will see the shot points of the last shape that you lifted are the only ones which are red which shows that they are highlighted.

Just left click on an area away from the various shapes and hold it down and drag it so that the rectangle that it creates surrounds completely all the shapes that you want to move.

Once you have done that,let go of the left mouse button, you should see that all the shot points of all the shapes that you sourrounded are red. Then hold down the Ctrl key and left click in the middle of the highlighted shapes and drag the shapes to where you want them.

You can rotate the set of shapes by clicking the rotate tool button and then pressing ctrl + shift + c which will place the rotate centre in the centre of the work window. Then left click and hold down and drag the little centre marker to where your group of shapes is. By this stage the shapes will not be highlighted. Simply repeat what is set out above to highlight all the shapes.

You can then rotate them to the exact position you want by holding down ctrl and left clicking in the group of shapes and dragging the mouse pointer and rotate the set of shapes as you wish.

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QUESTION :

Is there any way for me to have the fairway run up to the front of the green but without entirely circling the green ?.

I either have to cross lines or get the fairway boundry as close to the green boundry as I can (when this is done there is still a line of standard weed texture between the fairway and green--which I don't want) or is my only option to have an island of green surrounded by fairway ?.

ANSWER : Scott Antes

The fairway issue was big with me at first, but after working with it, I found the following worked very well :

1. Create Green.

2. Create fringe.

3. Create fairway and make it just 2 or 3 inches bigger than the fringe. You can now pull the fairway texture down the rest of the hole. (adding points along the way as to not distort the points around the fringe) After completing this:

4. Copy the fairway shape and enlarge by 5-10 feet and apply as light rough or first cut. You cannot even see the fairway texture up next to the fringe and first cut around the green that you want it to be hidden. The rest of the fairway runs up nice and neat. NOTE: Takes a little time, but well worth the results.

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QUESTION :

Is there any way to allow a cart path to cross over textures (ie one side of fairway to the other) ?.

ANSWER : Scott Antes

Why not create 2 seperate fairways and run the path in between them ?.

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Pga Mini - Tutorials - General Tips and Hints
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OPTIMIZATION TIPS : Ken Mchale

I would strongly recommend that anyone designing with PGA2000 take advantage of the “optimize detail”. MOST crashes, problems with executing elevations, shattered terrain and other issues while designing are a direct result of NOT maintaining a solid mesh (point density), which is a direct result of not “optimizing”. You can RENDER the underlying mesh by pressing CTRL ALT T… the same repeated action with those keys will make the rendered mesh disappear. A LOT of clutter and extra point detail will be seen this way if you are not optimizing. Check it after you optimize detail and see the difference.

If you want to “nest” each hole by drawing a land shape surrounding the hole, you can “optimize detail” by clicking on that surrounding land shape and check the box “include children”. This nesting contains the point count within the parent and children land shapes. I use it at the ‘: minimum” setting with no visible loss in elevation detail. After completing the hole, and optimizing detail I DELETE that nested land shape.

Augusta National Golf Club has all the major elevations finished on the land plot with 10 holes complete with detail, this includes Amen Corner. My TOTAL point count (found in Course Info) within the architect is 292227.

This point count is still low enough where I do not get a pop up prompting me to optimize detail. Use this feature and save yourself the frustration.

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DESIGN TIPS : Steve Knoblock

I started my first course, Redgap, but doing an empty landscape without any layout of holes. Once I had a landscape, I looked around for interesting views and places to position my hole elements (tees and greens). This process had the drawback, that in my enthusiasm for cool views, I placed my holes all over the place without any logical routing. Have to watch that in future.

So I started my next course, Brandymore, by starting with laying out interesting holes (basically geometries you could say) on the flat land plot. I was just fooling around then, waiting for PGA2K, not even thinking of keeping this course, but I made some holes that played interesting, so I went ahead and started working some elevations into the land plot.

One drawback of this method is once you have established elevations on one hole, you may have to work carefully around it. There is potential for creating isolated elevations that don't integrate well with the general landscape. However, it works fairly well if you just do the general elevations, not the fine slopes of fairways and greens. I had to finish this course by going back in PGA2000 to redo almost every inch of elevations now that I had virtually unlimited permission to make elevations. It was difficult to safely work around existing elevations.

I have come to the conclusion that whether or not you start by laying out the hole shapes or by making a landscape first, you must complete all general or broad elevations before attempting work on any hole-specific elevations (like the green or bunkers). Moreover, I think you can leave the bunkers flat until play testing is complete. It makes a great difference for actual play how deep the bunkers are, but for testing, it really only matters that you what situations drop a ball into the sand. Then elevate the bunkers down, do the green fine work then, and do a smooth of the hole area.

Dropping shapes adds detail to the shape they are dropped on. This is really significant on the base, which you really can't remove detail from without optimizing (dropping a shape and optimizing, then lifting and deleting may not do very much, because each adds breakline detail about equal to what you take out). I believe that partly it is forming the breakline that adds the detail, or at least the fine detail close to the breakline that anchors the shape. Repeated lifting and dropping of buffer shapes can get the base texture into an excess detail state.

Create the general landscape, then do elevations to the level where holes are playable. Only then give attention to each green and bunkers. That way they will see the least detail optimization before release.

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CUT ELEVATION TIP : Chris Perry

Something I just figured out about doing cut elevations on large shapes.

You should try to guard against doing them into large shapes, particularly fairway to light rough. Because of the area involved and the amount of detail in that area, trying to do it without a buffer shape around the fairway will often result in the operation taking up a lot more resources on your computer, and will create a lot of flaws around the area of the cut because of the detail already in the shape, and in some cases totally mess the hole up!!!

Here's what I did...

I used the fairway to make a shape and inflated it 6 inches and changed the properties to light rough and dropped it, this is the buffer and wont be seen.

Then to do the elevation I used the fairway to make a shape, duplicated it and inflated it 4 inches (note this is smaller than the buffer shape below it) and did a two shape drop at 0.2-0.3 (your preference as to the depth) and it did the operation much quicker and with better defintion, accuracy and much less flawed because it did the elevation on the buffer shape and not the entire rough area. Then do a detail optimization on the buffer shape and it should be done.

Try doing this on all areas that you want to do cuts on, even smaller ones like tees and greens etc. It will prevent excess points from going into your light rough texture, and it will do the operations more accurately without adding excess PD and filesize to your overall course size.

I think that with the Fairway-light rough this would be a must, as I had some seriously whacked out things happen to my entire hole without doing it!!!

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