Realistic Shore Line
The landmass tool makes great shoreline for small islands, but I need to make a large continent - 9,000 miles wide, and 11,000 miles tall. When I zoom in to place my objects the shore line looks very unrealistic with lots of strait lines. Advice please on how to improve my shorelines please. Thanks
Comments
It doesn't matter if you change the settings before you draw the landmass, or if you modify it later. Both options work equally well. Modifying it later is probably the easiest though, otherwise you need to constantly redraw your shapes.
Be careful however. To many nodes (and each time you fractalise a line you add more nodes) can slow down the program. Think about the intended use of the map. Do not add more details than neccessary. If you are not going to use the map in a zoomed in state, don't bother if it looks bad when you zoom in to work on it. Often you'll do more zooming when working than you would when you actually use the map later. If you want to be able to zoom far in, it is often better to make a separate regional map for the interesting areas in far greater details. This ensures that you can populate the detail map with a lot of stuff, without the world map looking cluttered (which it will do if you try to add every minor detail to it).
Usually, you'll stick with coastlines with less fractalisation on the world/continent maps, then copy parts of this coastline to the regional map, and do more fractalisation on it there.
For an example in North America, compare the shore in the Gulf of Mexico with (most of) Alaska's coast. If you use fractals, at least do shorelines in different sections (with different settings) to reflect these types of difference.
No matter what you do, when you zoom in far enough you will see straight lines (unless you've used a smooth polygon throughout, which I don't recommend). The trick is to make sure that at the scales you use the map, the shoreline looks good. Then when you need a detail area, create a new map for that area. When I create that detail map, I redraw the shoreline using the larger map as a guide. That way I can add details that would be invisible on the larger map (maybe that peninsula on the larger map is really a close-in island, inlets that are too narrow to show on the larger map, small islands, etc). You will want to do these detail maps anyway -- throughout the map there will be things that are relevant on the larger-scale map that are not shown on the smaller-scale map (e.g. the overall map might show a kingdom while the detailed map shows individual shires).
Steve
Export your landmass as a flat file (gif, jpg, etc) and then load it into photoshop or gimp. Apply whatever technique you choose to alter your coastline. Save the results and load it back into your drawing on a separate sheet. Then zoom in and trace a new cc3 landmass using altered image as a guide.