Sand Valley

[DC#1]

Hi Brian, any progress on Sand Valley? I looked at the course on google earth and it looks amazing. What is that small practice area just north of the clubhouse, looks like a wedge 9 hole practice area. How many holes are there, 27 or 36? Are you just doing 18 holes? Not pushing you to finish, was just wondering.

[BrianZ111]

Hey DC, yeah it is a pretty amazing place. The area north of the clubhouse is a 17 hole par 3 course called "The Sandbox" where the holes range from 50 to 150 yards. The greens and bunkers are particularly tricky and it is a lot of fun to play. There are currently two full length 18 hole courses, the original Sand Valley course to the south of the clubhouse and Mammoth Dunes to the east of it. I've been involved with the resort in one way or another since the beginning. I wish I had more time to work on these courses for PGA 2000 but the other things I have going on right now are keeping me very busy. OK I'm going into a long story that I didn't really have time to tell but too late, I already typed most of it up.

My interest in golf course architecture was really inspired by the hole by hole contest for PGA 2000 started by DanO at the Copyright Club in 2005. I did courses for games before that but the discussion in those contests really got me excited and were some of the most fun times I spent designing.

Fast forward to 2013, when I first heard that the Keiser's (of Bandon Dunes fame) were interested in building a resort with architecture like we discussed back then here in the middle of nowhere Wisconsin. I could hardly believe it. Through some news article, I found out Oliphant Golf construction was to be involved. I sent them a message through the contact form on their website about what I do creating courses for simulators and games and saying if there's any way I could be involved I'd like to. Over the next three weekends in September 2013 I went out and took pictures of the land. This was before the Keiser's even bought the property. I ended up posting these pictures on the Golf Club Atlas forum and the day after I did that, I heard back from Craig Haltom at Oliphant. Since I knew how to work with LiDAR for simulator/game course design, he asked me if I could make topographic maps from it. I had never done it before but I said I could probably figure it out and I ended up doing the topographic mapping they needed for the architects to base their course designs on.

Various other, crazy, impossible things have happened along the way. In 2017 when they wanted to do a contest in partnership with Golf Digest for designing the 14th hole on Mammoth Dunes, I got the job of making a video rendering of the land. Unfortunately this disqualified me from entering the contest. However I told Brian Silvernail about the contest, who I'm sure you know from his PGA 2000 course designs, and course designs for various other games. I've been friends with him though playing golf games online with him for a little over 10 years now. He entered and ended up winning the contest out of some 500 people who entered. They flew him up here and I got to meet him in person and play golf with him along with David McLay Kidd, architect of Mammoth Dunes, and Ron Whitten, Golf Digest Architecture Editor.

As if that couldn't be outdone, now we've started construction on a third full length course at the resort. It is a complete reconstruction of The Lido, the historic lost course on Long Island. We're bringing it back to life in central Wisconsin. You may remember something about this course because R.S. Barker was creating it for PGA 2000 back in the day but never finished it. I actually tried to reach out to him last year because we were looking for any information we could find about it but I didn't hear back from him. The e-mail address I had for him must no longer work.

A guy named Peter Flory did complete a version of it last year for The Golf Club 2019 / PGA Tour 2k21 after doing extensive research and using people from the Golf Club Atlas forum as a resource. Last fall I got the opportunity to figure out how to turn his model of it in the game back into maps we could use for construction. It was a particularly difficult problem to solve because that game doesn't store the course as a mesh but rather a series of action by the user to recreate a mesh. I ended up automating the measure tool in the game to measure a grid of points and then create the map from those points as if they were LiDAR. We are mostly using that model for construction now. Tom Doak is the consulting architect and has made some minor changes in adding spacing between some of the holes for safety reasons because some of the tees and greens were so close to landing areas that it doesn't meet today's safety standards. This also made room for some longer tees but you'll still be able to play the original tees if you want. Other than that, and the fact that we have no ocean view here, the goal is to recreate the entire course as accurately as possible on a plot wide scale.

Now I'm doing GPS surveying for the construction. I got to see the previous courses a few times during construction but not working out there on a week to week basis. Currently I am out there 1 to 3 times a week as needed. In between visits I'm working on developing the best way to use maps out there and various other projects. After doing real course recreations for games for 20 years, it's pretty cool to get to be part of a real course recreation in the real world and it's a fun challenge to help try to figure out how to do it best. Since there is no "Import LiDAR" in the real world for now we are falling back on an older idea in the computer course design world. Trace the topo lines and mark them for how much up or down they need to go.

And we are working out there right through the winter despite the snow and the cold! Turns out with heated socks and heated gloves, 10° isn't so bad. So, please accept my long winded excuse for why I haven't finished Sand Valley for PGA 2000. In truth I didn't really expect to finish when I started. But my excuse is getting better.

[DC#1]

Very interesting read. Thanks for taking the time to tell your story. I remember the hole contests and the discussions. Very cool you got to play with Brian S. David and Ron. I recall Brian S. from GBC. I watched the you tube video of The Golf Club version of The Lido Club, very nice. I am really jealous you get to work on a real course project. I was just through your neck of the woods at Christmas visiting my daughter in Michigan. Stay warm

[BrianZ111]

If you happen to be in the area again sometime and have some time to stop let me know. I can give you a tour of what we're doing there.

[DC#1]

Hi Brian, any updates on Sand Valley. I know real work has kept you busy. Just wondering. What was that JNPG project you talked about, any progress on that or is it dead in the water. I see your course called The Sand Slopes, is it based on Sand Valley, or a fictional course on The "Real" Sand Valley plot.

[BrianZ111]

Hi DC, thanks for asking. I think I will make another attempt at Sand Valley for PGA 2000 if/when I figure out how to import an entire plot of LiDAR data into the architect.

For the JNPG stuff, The Sand Slopes was my entry into Perfect Parallel's contest to design a par 3 course in 2018. It is fictional and I did it on a part of the Sand Valley land that was not used at the time. Most of it actually ended up being where Tom Doak's Sedge Valley course will go which starts construction next year. I had very little time to complete it (like 3 weeks) as I found out about the contest late and had never used Course Forge or Unity before so considering that, it turned out pretty good but I would have done some things different if I had more time. It ended up scoring high enough to get a small cash prize but towards the bottom of those that did. Because of that I had to wait until Mike Jones gave me the OK to actually release it to the public. I guess it was exclusive on TrackMan's simulator for awhile.

After that I started working on Pine Hills Golf Club, a real course in Sheboygan, WI, for JNPG. I would say that's kind of dead in the water now as I haven't touched it in a very long time and the hard drive I had Unity installed on died. I still have all the course files backed up but I don't even have Unity installed anywhere at the moment. The course is actually playable...LiDAR imported, all golf lines are drawn in and water and trees were placed, not carefully to match the course exactly, but close enough to make the course work. It's all of the fine detail work to make it look good that never got done. If somebody wanted to take this over and finish it, I'd happily let them, but I don't think there's too many people left over there now.

For work now, Tom Doak offered me the incredible opportunity to do an internship with him over the winter. In the first week in the office at Traverse City I got to help him work on a routing for a potential client, then we took a trip to Florida and Texas were I got to see how he works on the road and interacts with clients, see and play some great golf courses, and meet some interesting people. I think the three things he's most interested in from me are my ability to create Topo maps from LiDAR, what I can do shaping holes in the computer that could then be copied to the ground with GPS dozers (as we did at Lido, though Peter Flory did most of that shaping) and in visuals to show clients what a course could look like, and that clients could use to sell the course concept to investors, members, customers, etc.

Between Thanksgiving and Christmas I'm back home in Wisconsin but I'll be focusing my work on learning Unreal Engine because I want to give him a better visual product than any of the current golf games can offer and I think UE is the best way to do that. Hopefully Brian Silvernail will have some time to help me out with this as well because he is one of the best at visuals for golf games. We talk pretty much every week online when a group of us gets together to play some golf games, but I also got to meet up with him in person for a few days and talk about it when I was in Florida since that is where he lives.

I'm going back to Traverse City in January and staying until sometime in February when Tom leaves for New Zealand to work on his new course at Te Arai. Tom would have sent me to New Zealand as well during that time frame until we started on the Lido again but in all likelihood I won't be going because of the travel restrictions in place due to COVID. New Zealand currently doesn't let anyone in the country who is not a citizen unless they have a special work visa (which Tom has) and it would be too expensive to try to get me that apparently. Tom wants to get all the greens shaped on his one trip, then have them mapped and put back by a GPS dozer when they are ready to seed. The wind will blow the sand around and change things and normally he'd have to make several trips and only do the greens that were just about ready to be seeded each time. I will likely manage the digital files involved in that remotely but I'm not sure yet what else I'll be doing beyond February before we start up on the Lido again.

[DC#1]

I couldn't be happier for you. It amazes me to see where this game has taken you. I have looked at video of Unreal Engine and it looks off the charts. Probably the best engine out there at the moment. Thanks for the update.

[BrianZ111]

Thanks, yeah, I certainly never imagined it either. My big break was Sand Valley being built so close to where I live and Craig Haltom of Oliphant Golf believing that I could provide something useful to the project when I reached out and later when he thought of me for what they needed on the Lido. Then it was just working hard to figure out how to apply my skills and knowledge to things they needed. It was also a very slow process to make it go from side jobs in 2013 through 2019 to full time in the last year and maybe a career beyond that. I didn't know if I could do that or even think that would happen, my main goal was always just to get into the courses for simulators business full time which up to this point I only made work for a brief time. So as far as doing something like this for a living long term, it feels like I may be finally turning the corner on that now and in a different way then I expected. I'm not sure where it all leads to yet but I know I'm incredibly lucky to get the opportunity to find out.