Suggestions on how to make river connecting to ocean smoother/more natural?
JulianDracos
Mapmaker
Most of the time, if I can line a river up with a flat piece of land at the water's edge, it looks seemless with the ocean/lake. Sometimes I can't match things up. So do any of you have suggestions for making rivers have a more natural look when connecting to the ocean?
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I think I've seen Ralf do this in a few different ways in the Livestreams, depending on the map style.
Which style are you using?
Well this happens with a lot of map styles. However, the one I am currently using is Herwin Weilik.
If you mean trouble trying to click exactly on the coastline, you can use the F9 key to attach the end of the river to any point on the coast as you draw it.
If you mean the visual mismatch that sometimes occurs where there are different sheet effects on different sheets, you might consider adding a Color Key sheet effect to the Land sheet, converting all the rivers to solid magenta, then moving them onto the LAND sheet, where they would then cut a line through the land. This is only realy successful if you haven't covered the land all over in terrain textures, or haven't done it yet so that you can avoid going over the rivers when you do.
reversing the relative position of the land and sea sheets and drawing all the water on top of the land is Another way of doing it, but this is quite involved and means changing the background to land texture, redrawing the ocean on a new sheet above the land and terrain sheets, and then drawing the rivers on the same sheet as the ocean. There are advantages and disadvantages to doing it that way, but some of the more recent overland styles in the Cartographer's Annual have sea over land like that. You would need to put the land sheet effects on the ocean sheet instead and invert their direction - inside where it was outside on the land, and vice-versa. That's what I mean about being rather involved.
I have seen maps in the past where mappers have carefully drawn little river mouths over the join between river and sea ona new sheet and tried to blend the two things together that way, but again that is quite time consuming to do and doesn't always work terribly well.
Well one of the specific problems I am having is that the rivers are rectangles. When I get to the coastline, if the angle of the river is not matched up just right, then a side of the river rectangle goes into the ocean. Meanwhile, what should be a wide mouth of the river is now more of a narrow point.
If the scale of the map is such that this is noticeable, you might consider drawing the rivers as polygons, rather than lines. Use the Change like draw tool in the right click menu of the Change Properties button and pick a river. Then hide all the other sheets and use the TRACED keyboard command to trace a river system. You will have to delete the original river line, but now you have a polygon instead of a line you can change the mouth of the river to be as wide as you like.
I am drawing the river is chunks for different sizes, so I can just so the poly at the last section.
One thing I have been meaning to ask about is drawing polys. Many times, it is just drawing them as line segments instead of an object with the center filled. I was playing around with the smooth poly earlier today, and it was basically just drawing rivers. Yet, it was not the river tool because it matched whatever the poly I selected was. The problem is that the smooth poly was just an outline using the river fill, but the center of the poly was empty.
It sounds like you had a line width other than zero. Any polygon with a line width greater than zero will have a hollow centre. Use Change Properties to correct it.