The course is a real course situated in the city of Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, Australia. It is also my home course. I have wanted to do this course since the first day I used the APCD (Arnold Palmer Course Designer).

I was initially just going to do a rough version for myself and one of my best mates Gus Green. Due to it being a real design, I sent a letter to the board of directors at the club asking for permission to do it. In the letter I gave a little bit of my history with the game and designer thinking it would help my chances in gaining their approval. I had just released Tall Pines Estate, my third fictional design, so I also sent a link to the review that was written at Links Corner (www.linkscorner.com).

I wasn't prepared for the response that I received. Jason Russell, the Secretary of the club, called me the day he received the letter asking to have a meeting with me. At that meeting, Jason enquired as to how long the project might actually take, the date of the meeting was the 17th February, 2003. I guessed it would roughly take me 6 to 8 months. The reason for so much time being spent on it was a result of that first meeting. Jason wanted to know because the club was starting a new advertising campaign at the start of 2004, involving TV ads. For the last few years, they have had local businesses sponsor a hole and then use that as the base of the add. Up until this year the add consisted of showing an aerial fly-by of the hole (by helicopter), then have the sponsors ad following. Jason was wanting to try something different, and my letter was the thing that set things in motion. Once he and the directors had a look at how detailed the courses were becoming, they thought, what a great opportunity, lets use a computer based animation at the beginning of the add. The only problem was, you cant generate fly-bys with the APCD or the game itself. I started the project, now with this in mind, so it had now become a full on effort to create the course as accurately as possible. A few months into it, I had a thought on how we could use them for the TV ads. I hooked up my digital video camera to the video out jack on my graphics card, and hey presto, I could record everything that was happening on the screen. I then started a practice round using the Powerstroke swing style. Powerstroke replayes are void of any other graphics on the screen except the course name. This was a perfect setup, I recorded the replays hole by hole then sent the footage to the TV station. They then ripped out what they needed to give a TV broadcast effect, making it look as though the shots were being played in real time, changing camera angles like you would see in a real life tourny. The only thing they had to fix was the course name up the top of the screen, which was neatly covered by a Top 100 Courses banner. When they are all done, I will be making mpeg files for everyone to download so they can see how it was done. These will eventually be available at www.apcd-courses.com and my own website www.hewisgolfdesign.com. The course also did not have a current yardage book. So with this in mind, I suggested we use the hole previews from the game and print them into a book. As I am very graphically challenged, I enlisted one of my best friends, Gus Green, who is a Graphic Artist by trade. If you would like a copy of it, please contact Ian Ferguson in the pro shop or any of the directors of the club.

Notes of Interest

Sounds : I have not added a sound for the creek. There is usually not any water in it, but I thought I would add it anyway to help make the gameplay a little more interesting. I was experiencing the 'sticking sound' bug. No matter what I did, or what sound card I used (drivers included), I could not get rid of it. It was really annoying so I left it out for that reason. I don’t think it detracts from playing the course at all, so that is why you don’t hear it.
There are many native Australian bird sounds around the course. These include Crows (Wagga Wagga is an Aboriginal word meaning place of many crows), Magpies and Kookaburras (these were thought to be a monkey sound by one of my testers hahahaha). There is also a heavily used road that lines the 13th and 14th holes. You will hear the occasional car pass by there, I have tried to space out the sounds so they don’t repeat too often, it will just depend on how long you stay in one area admiring the scenery :) . It is very difficult to get the balance correct, also the volume, with many different sound cards and driver sets reacting differently. I hope I have achieved a nice balance for all.

15th Hole : A few of the testers questioned the design, or rather the location of the first group of fairway bunkers. I have made the fairway around eight metres wide next to the third bunker. In real life it is actually only around five metres, so it is pretty much like it is in real life. I am not keen on the design myself, I would rather have seen the bunkers placed further left towards the fence line. The hole was redesigned around eighteen months ago due to potential legal problems arising from stray golf balls landing in private backyards. The design was meant to discourage people cutting the corner, over the top of the houses. I believe it has actually forced many of the longer hitters (including myself) to take it on every time. I just cant justify hitting a five or a six iron from the tee on a par five.

So don’t come complaining to me that it doesn’t look or feel right, you can blame that on the guys who redesigned it, hehehe.

The construction

Total build time : 1200 hours - approx, ( includes trips to the course taking notes, measurements and photos)
Number of photos taken : 1700 approx

Course stats, taken from the APCD.

Verts : 42,187
Faces : 81,847
2d Objects : 331,079
3d Objects : 1170
Sounds : 23
Shapes : 20 (after all unused shapes were deleted)
Textures : 130 (that is not a typo, hehe)
Mappings : 1333

To make sure I had the correct elevations, I contacted a land and environment office in Sydney, that dealt with topographical maps. I was fortunate enough to obtain two maps from them that covered all of the course and surrounding areas. The only bad thing was that they were not a very finely contoured map. The contours were at two metre elevations. So the course is as accurate as I could get it from that info. I also had use of an aerial photo of the course that was taken around twenty years ago. I know that's not the best, but the course has not really changed that much over this time. The actual photo is hanging on a wall in the clubhouse, so I tried to find out who took the shot to see if there were still any copies lying around. Unfortunately I had no luck in tracking down the photographer. So with trusty digital camera in hand, I took photos of the photo and then stitched them together to get a pretty finely detailed shot.
In Photoshop, I made the top view the base layer, then overlayed the topo map as another layer, then using the fade in/out tool, lined them both up so they matched perfectly I then cut the photo and topo map up into twelve different 512x512 tga's, imported them into the APCD, then laid them out so they all matched up. Then I scaled everything so that most of the holes measured what they did in real life. I put in the topo map textures first, allowing me to put in the verts along the elevation lines. Once they were all in, it was only a matter of selecting all of the verts and raising them by two metres, unselecting the outer rings and raising another two metres. I kept doing this until the whole course was done. This gave me a plot that was pretty close in elevation to the real thing. Then it was time to replace the topo textures with the aerial ones. Because I had them perfectly lined up in Photoshop first, when I put them into the course, the elevations lined up with everything only leaving the fine detail elevations left i.e.: greens, tees, humps and bumps. Sounds easy, but it still took me quite a while to get it all sorted.
Once I had most of the holes painted onto the aerial textures, it was time to start creating some custom 2d images. As this is an Australian course with lots of native trees on it, the APCD had nothing like what I needed. So out came the digital camera once again. I managed to get a few of the trees on the course, but due to them being so close together, I had little chance of getting many from the course itself. I must have driven up and down every farm road for a 2 hour radius around Wagga, searching for gum trees on the side or on top of a hill, so I could get lots of blue sky in the background, making it much easier for Dex and Gus to cut them out and create the images I needed. Most of the other objects you will see, like the sand buckets, water bubblers, ball washers, bins, hole signs and other signs etc. are straight from the course.
To make sure I had the course as close as I could get, I borrowed the measure wheel from the greens staff (thanks guys) and a cart, then drove around the course measuring everything I could. As the hole previews were going to be used as the official 'yardage' ( or metreage if you like) book, I had to be spot on. For the sake of making the gameplay a little tougher, the course has been setup to play at its absolute maximum distance. This will throw out some of the distances from the real life course, just in case you were wondering why some holes seem longer than they actually are. Also, I am using the back tee box on the Par 5 12th, it is very rarely used, so this is why the hole is around 15 metres longer than you would think it was.
The panorama created a few problems. The main problem was with how the game renders it. It is rendered at the same size no matter how close/far away you are from it. With quite a bit of land/hills visible on the other side of Plumpton Rd. (lining the 13th and 14th) from different parts of the course, it was almost impossible to get it to look right from those locations. So everything you see there has been created from the terrain. With three sides of the course presenting the same problem, this almost took me as long to create as the course itself. Especially with the houses that line the 15th. There are around 20 houses in that area. 12 of them ( one of them including a swimming pool) have been built from the terrain, a grey hair experience I can assure you. I was fortunate that I could get away with only building 12 and not the 20 I was planning on. The only part of the panorama that you will see, is the other side of Lake Albert.
There are quite a few 3d objects on the course, many of them have been built from the terrain. These include the Clubhouse, Pro Shop, Wagga Boat Club (behind the 1st green), water viaducts in the creek and the power poles that can be seen on the 1st, 9th and 18th. Plus a few other things, you will have to try and find them :)