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.