Playing towards the Black Swan. View from the landing area of the 4th fairway over to the 4/15th double green:
At this stage I only deal with terrain contours and playing surfaces. Off-course textures, grasses and rocks to be added later. I changed the fog color from light blue to light yellow to give a bit of a dryer look.
And here's the double fairway for the 5th and 15th holes. Landing areas on either side of the central bunker island.
Good job overall with the terrain sculpting.
But I have a few criticisms:
1) The texture & color of your large waste areas (or whatever those things are) doesn't look particularly life-like and resembles something from an oil painting. This is the biggest problem by far, aesthetically speaking.
2) You are blurring/smoothing the edges of your fairway/rough a bit too much for the level of jigsaw-like curves that you have in some places. The eyes can't be fooled. It creates an oil painting effect. Casual curves can be smoothed a lot without drawing much attention (which you do nicely in many areas) but jigsaw-like curves draw more visual attention to the edges -- which are way too over-blurred (probably necessary to get rid of the jagged edges). It only takes a few ruined curves to make your course look like a painting rather than a TV screen.
3) The large waste area located to the right of the fairway (in the bottom photo; from the perspective of the viewer) looks phony because of the super-thick dark edges. I do understand that when the camera pans in closer the edges probably look more "realistic". But from this distance it looks almost as though you were tracing that edge with a dark colored crayon -- similar to the way kids often trace dark edges around their pictures before coloring them in lighter. It screams "phony" when my eyes reach that point. If the edge was thinner (or less dark) it wouldn't look so phony. You can't design your course to only look good from a close up view.
I'm being honest to help, not to hurt. I understand my comments will be ignored and seen as hostile, but that doesn't stop me from stating the truth anyway. I say whatever is on my mind, positive or negative.
I do like your attention to detail in terms of making grass blotchy and sculpting hills. That aspect looks particularly good.