Does anybody know of a program that works best for golf course design and other landscaping.

Vue d'Esprit, Bryce, both are good terrain modellers with enough controls to do a good job of it. there are other terrain applications, but they are designed for world building rather than something as specific as the golf course, or they have more limited tools for working with the terrain design.

Bryce 5 or above and Vue would be fine. If you have Vue infinate then you can have an unlimited number of trees. First make a Greyscale to height map of what you want the course to look like. (white high points black low) Import it into the program of choice and then add your trees flags you can import the buildings in 3ds or obj for your clubhouse etc. Even soem golf cart models both would work fine.

Official golf course design for the real world deals heavily with volumes. It's just basically moving dirt from one place to another and hopefully not to have too much to remove entirely or add in the process. So something that can report total volumes of the cuts and fills is needed. Some CAD add ons to AutoCAD, MicroStation or whatnot to compute volumes between surfaces or of solids are about the least you need (I figure.) It's sort of funny in a way, I program for a company that makes Mining software (planning, sheduling, design yadda...) and our software was used in the planning of one or two courses. Namely the owner's brother or best friend who was in the golf course design biz. got a deal on our software. Mind you our software is way overkill for the task. But then this is irrelevant to the topic. I think most graphics programs can make passable golf courses if it's only to be really used for fantasy display purposes. Heightfields/heightmaps are simple to get the lay of tha land a big. But they are really limited in number of height levels the surface can take. Silhouets will give away the height map if done poorly. Because of the limited number of elevations to play with you end up having to play with the resolution of the map with the world. Too high a resolution and the elevation changes and bitmap nature of the surface is evident. Too low and there's not enough definition to the surface. Also, not always simple to visualize the result of the surface when painting a gray scale image.

Attached Link: http://www.3dnature.com/

Hmmm...I'm not sure about Vue or Bryce...I don't think they are too great on working with "real world units"...they are more for purely "artistic" purposes. If you need a guaranteed application that is used for this purpose then take a look at World Construction Set (WCS 3) from 3D Nature: http://www.3dnature.com/ Hope this helps. Cheers