The Smooth Tools are like dessert, or a brandy, after a big meal. They are the finishing touch that brings it all together and give you a feeling of contentment.
The Smooth Tools smooth out the contours of your course, the boundaries between different terrains, and the grid.
This tool lets you smooth the terrain altitude around and within a selected area. It can only be used if a part of the course is selected. Smooth Relief also smoothes vertical spikes you may have on the edges of newly edited terrain.
Selecting an area of the course and choosing the Smooth Relief tool brings up a dialog box.
Clip by Selection
If this box is checked, the smoothing will occur only to the area within the selection marquee. If you select the area at the top of a hill and smooth it with this option checked, the hill outside the marquee will remain the same and the top of the hill will level off into a mesa.
If this box is not checked, the smoothing will also occur to the region immediately surrounding the marquee as well. In the example of the hill in the previous paragraph, this will cause the entire hill to flatten out.
Smooth
This box controls the smoothness factor, which ranges from 0 to 10. The higher the number, the greater the degree of smoothing. The value 0 is no smoothing at all, while 10 makes the area tabletop smooth.
If there are any irregularly shaped grid "squares" within a given selection, clicking inside the marquee with this tool will square them up again.
No matter how many more times you use this tool on a given selection, the results won't change after the first time.
If you have a particular terrain type selected, clicking on the selection with this tool will pare down and smooth out the edges. Continued clicking will refine the edge of the terrain even more.