Firstly, Jim, thank you for all the spaghetti maps and the google earth flyovers - I really loved seeing my submission 'come to life' in 3D.
I realised though, that I had always in my mind, the initial image that Alex loaded up of the sand hills countryside, so I suppose I always had a site with more severe movement, than what we were given with the reduced contour lines. I still tried as much as possible, rightly or wrongly, to make the most of the more severe sections or features, or that was at least my aim. The flyover helped highlight where I missed the mark a little, and another couple of holes where I am most pleased with the result.
In finding the routing, choosing the par 3's was important for me, as I am a big fan of par 3's and they are often the highlights of a course for me.
I began with 4 distances that I wanted to find - at one end of the scale, a tee shot that required a driver or 3 wood with option for the ball to run onto the green and the other end was a wedge or short iron - i also had a short list in my head of great par 3's that i wanted to use as inspiration, and feel i got close to a couple. Next I wanted to find them routed to the four points of the compass if possible(I got to three), and thirdly where they occurred in the routing, trying to achieve the correct balance I was looking for.
I think there are more opportunities on a site like this for interesting short holes as you have two things in your favour, you can dictate exactly where you want your golfer to play his shot from, and you can use features that are sometimes not appropriate for longer holes, because you can also control the distance and hence the club required.
Overall, I didn't have any issues in finding the holes and using the features I wanted - where I hit problems, were when I add a group of holes, say a 3-4 hole stretch, that didn't hook up to the next hole or holes. Also, things that were further down my list of priorities, par of opening/finishing holes, direction of the finishing holes, etc - as I also planned, for a site of this size, that I should have been able to further balance the entire routing around the points of the compass, especially with the two large hills on the site.
I have found it harder to indentify cool greens, as without a lot of detail on most of the submissions, it is difficult to know the intention of the design. I think most of the cool sites for greens, were used by one or more designs.
Jim, in your testing of those flyover models, did you do any with full scale, not reduced ? Was there a massive difference in the visual?