Help With Making Clean Coast Lines

[Orastus]

Hello all,

I am new to the forum. I have been working through various tutorials for a while, trying to become familiar with different techniques and building a basic skill set.

I am looking for advice regarding land masses/coast lines. I have studied the alpha map techniques in the Ascension and Jezelf tutorials. I have become comfortable with them. However, I don't feel these techniques are giving me the really defined, clean coast lines I want. My edges are usually far too jagged and noisy. When I attempt to smooth them, they become too rounded. Or I lose a lot of nice defining features, such as coves and bays.

How do you approach generating your land masses and defining coast lines? Do you hand draw them or go procedurally? I am not the most talented with a pencil, but I am more than willing to learn and practice the skill.

I am very fond of the detail rich coasts in maps Pasis and Arsheesh use in their tutorials, as well as many others featured on the forums. I hope to someday produce something of that caliber. Thank you.

[Midgardsormr]

Chances are that you need to increase your working resolution. Try making your coastlines at double the resolution of your eventual map, then scaling it down and see if that gives you the improvement you're after.

Otherwise, post up some samples to illustrate the problem, and we'll try to give you more specific help.

[johnvanvliet]

also use a large map

back in 2008 you might have had 1 gig of ram ( maybe 2 gig ram )

today it is HARD to find a desktop with less than 8 gig