Crop symbols at land border?
What I like to convey on my maṕ is a Norwegian Fiord like situation.
In my overland map, I have a region where hills and mountains border the sea. And I really want to show it on the map that there is basically no beach available for landing a ship or something like that (at least not ones that are known to the public).
I'm aware that clipping high mountains would look odd, but I think basically filling this part of the land mass with foot hill symbols cropped by the land border would give a good background, on which I could place some mountains close to the sea (without clipping, so the shadow might actually protrude into the waters).
Is this possible? Is this the right way? Or am I totally wrong here? I'm a total beginner, so tell me when I'm wrong.
In my overland map, I have a region where hills and mountains border the sea. And I really want to show it on the map that there is basically no beach available for landing a ship or something like that (at least not ones that are known to the public).
I'm aware that clipping high mountains would look odd, but I think basically filling this part of the land mass with foot hill symbols cropped by the land border would give a good background, on which I could place some mountains close to the sea (without clipping, so the shadow might actually protrude into the waters).
Is this possible? Is this the right way? Or am I totally wrong here? I'm a total beginner, so tell me when I'm wrong.
Comments
The most common way (which is what is being done at the map border) is to simply cover part of them up with another entity. You can do this where the land meets the sea, but this really means that the sea has to appear above the land, i.e. that you start with a map that is completely land and add seas on top instead of the traditional way around. This do work fine, but you'll probably have to rework some of the effects in the map since coastline effects are usually part of the land sheet. Of course, with the seas on top, the shadows from the mountains will also be covered up instead of protruding out into the sea.
The other way is to edit the symbols themselves. This however, is much more tricky, since the images for raster symbols need to be edited in an external image editor and then imported into the map as new symbols. Lots of work, since you probably need a lot of different symbol variations, and also makes your .fcw file non-portable since nobody else will have these symbols. It'll be a lot of work just to make the correct edits as well, since it happens outside CC3+. Generally not an approach I would recommend.