— Warren Henderson, lead designer for Nick Price

Computer-aided design software revolutionized and changed the world forever. Every aspect of the AEC (Architecture, Engineering and Construction) field dramatically changed. Yet, even with the advanced technology, golf course designers still draw contour plans by hand.

Many of the world’s leading golf course designers go through an arduous process whereby a skilled designer hand draws contours. A production staff member then manually digitizes and converts the contours into simple CAD linework. This in turn, is then analyzed to determine earthwork calculations.

The production staff resubmits the calculated plans back to the designer for any adjustments. This time-consuming cycle continues until the project objectives are achieved.

No more! TerrainTek makes this back-and-forth process obsolete. The power of GCD offers:

	Automatic contour lines and elevation labeling. Keep track of terrain elevations easily with contour lines that redraw in realtime, as you edit. Place elevation labels exactly where you want. Long gone are the days of modifying contours on tracing paper. GCD is like having virtual tracing paper.
	Cut/fill analysis. Track differences between new and old terrain automatically, with statusbar readouts showing total cut and fill volumes and relative colormaps highlighting where the edits are. Assess volumes for selected subregions too.
	Contour import/export. Directly read in contour data from DXF polyline or ESRI shapefiles, and export to DXF.
	Automation. Powerful plug-ins simplify common tasks, such as creating slope-constant lakebeds. Create your own plug-ins too with our SDK.
	Easy map registration. Drape a color texture over your terrain, and easily move, resize, and rotate it into position. Georeferenced textures are also supported for automatic registration.
	Flexible measurement. Work with realworld coordinates, or use a custom local coordinate system. Use different measurement units for ground and altitude.
	DXF mesh input/output. Generate regular or optimized meshes of your work. Read DXF meshes in from other programs and digitize them to a preferred resolution. Automatically import DXF map coordinates and output them back.
	Renderer support. Do simple fly-through animations and raytraced renditions directly inside GCD, or export to Renderman.
	Graphics tablet support. Gain a natural drawing feel. Apply a light touch to create subtle lifts and depressions or a heavy one to quickly push elevations around. Customize pressure sensitivity mappings individually for each tool.
Requirements: Microsoft Windows 95 or higher; AMD or Intel PC with Pentium III or faster. Multicore systems are leveraged. 512 MB or more RAM recommended. Graphics tablet recommended. Hardware accelerated OpenGL recommended. 2 Ghz (or faster) CPUs recommended for advanced operations. Some TabletPCs may require WinTab driver emulation.