Today I am doing the first hole of my new course (still without a name), and here is how I do it, and I am also typing this while I am designing so I can remember it!
The first thing I did was in my last pic, where I tilt the hole how I want it and made an area where the ball will feed into a wooded area on the left of the fairway. Today, I raised and flattened my tee boxes to a height where the fairway can be seen enough to know where to hit and also to look how a tee area would look on a real course. Then I move up the hole and do a few subtle bumps and hills on the way to the fairway. When I get to the fairway, I make numerous shapes to provide some personality to the hole. I do shape within a shape too and in the first area of the fairway that I have focused on, this is what I have:
After I get the area I have zoomed in on, I delete all shapes and smooth on the second setting until I see nice smooth hills and valleys. For now, I only optimize the fairway and save. The reason I do part of the fairway is to get a closer look at it. It also helps with bunkering when I get to it. I do not mess with the bunker right now, and move on over to the rest of the fairway all the way up to the green. I repeat the same procedure from the first part of the fairway, and now will go back and do the fairway bunkers. In this case, there is only 1 of them. I will get to how I do bunkers later on in the course, since I am trying the wavy edged bunkers right now. So far, so good though. Here is a look from about 170 yards out with everything but the green area completed:
On to the green we go! I generally put some mounding around the green, much like I see at the courses around here. It makes for a great amphitheater for the crowds. I always do my greenside traps before I touch the green, because I use a lot of space to smooth my bunkers and it goes well into the putting surface. When I make green undulations, I try to keep in mind that smoothing will lessen the slope and I go ahead and raise and lower about 1.5 times what I want it to actually be. Once again, I will draw several shapes and even use the 2 shape tool. I almost always use the 2 shape tool instead of flattening to make a lower or upper tier, so I can keep my original slope in the green. When I finish with my shapes, I encircle the green and some of the surrounding area and smooth on the second setting......I always use the second setting for smoothing. So below is the unsmoothed green on the left and the ALMOST finished product on the right:
Now I need to optimize only the green at this time, save, then check to see if my green is going to be puttable on very dry conditions. I use the tape measure tool and start checking different spots on the green to see if the sloping is too extreme, or even on occasion too flat. After doing this, I have determined that there is too much slope coming off of the back bunker. When this happens instead of completely redoing the green, I will simply use the 2 shape tool and slope it the opposite way. In this case, I simply used the bunker as a shape, enlarged it by 2 feet, then drew a massive circle around it focusing on the areas of the green that need to be fixed. It worked, so now I am finished with the first hole elevations and will go ahead and optimize every texture within the hole, except the traps (I only optimize them when I do them). Lastly, optimize the main texture, in this case it's the deep rough. Then save, or as some people do, save as...and give it a course name plus a version number. One thing I was told by a gentleman we all knew as DanO, is that when optimizing and saving to close my camera window, as it takes up a little bit of memory. I really don't know if todays computers will be affected by this or not, but I still do it anyways.
Almost forgot.............since the hole is finished, I will take a good look at the green and select several pin locations that are not ridiculous. I always try to put at least 5 locations on every green. Most of these greens are toughly 30 yards by 20 yards. Some are bigger depending on how long the hole is relative to par. For example, let's say we have a par 3 of 125 yards and a par 3 of 225 yards. You don't need a lot of green hitting at a 125 yard hole. A 225 yard par 3 will most likely be a long iron or a wood, which neither will stop on a dime on dry or very dry conditions.
I hope I'm not rambling or giving too much basic info, just trying to explain my methods and why I do them. I'll continue with updates. By the way, doing the hole and the forum post at the same time has roughly taken an hour and a half.
Doron