I'd like some help with my world's coastlines.

[Mysterious Mapmaker XXIII]

Okay, so here's this world I'm working on. It's called Delmeiri, and its geography is loosely based on an east-west reversal of our own world's geography. I've been working on it for a while now, and I think I'm getting pretty close to done.

There's just one problem: the coastlines look more than a bit off to me. They look ugly and unnatural. What exactly am I doing wrong? And how do I fix it?

[Savage Orc]

You could always try this.
https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...ead.php?t=9056

[Mysterious Mapmaker XXIII]

Hm...that might actually work.

Still, this is an entire world, which means different coastlines should have different properties. I'll have to figure out how to vary that method for different parts of the world.

[antillies]

If you're not opposed to reapproaching the map as a whole, I would humbly suggest this wonderful tutorial by Tear. Besides using a program like Fractal Terrains, Tear's method is the easiest and best looking that I've found to create continents. It essentially comes down to generating clouds, applying a threshold, and then using a large, low-hardness, low-opacity brush to "chip away" at the shapes until you get something that you like. And naturally you can do this as much as you want, with different cloud fields, until you have a selection of continents that you can place and arrange to create your world map.

Hope that helps!

[Mysterious Mapmaker XXIII]

@antilles: Truthfully, I'd rather stick with what I have. But thanks.

I think I know how to give different coastlines different properties. Once it's time for the whole Threshold thing, I'll split the map up into pieces, and give each piece its own layer. Then, I'll apply the Threshold to each layer individually, altering the actual threshold for each layer.

Now I just need to figure out how to divide up the coastlines, and how jagged to make each one. Any advice there?

[antillies]

Apologies for the delayed response.

I think I phrased my suggestion poorly. My point in recommending Tear's method of continent creation was not to suggest you redo your continents, rather to use the cloud/threshold method in order to generate portions of the continental coast and piece many of them together until you had not only retained the general shape of your original continents but also a much more realistic coastline.

I was going to do this with one of yours as a proof of concept but then I happened upon this tutorial by jezelf. The first one - "Turning your hand drawn sketch into a detailed alpha map" - was more or less what I was imagining you could do to it (see pg. 4, steps 1.7-1.8). The two images at the bottom of pg. 4 is exactly what I would have proposed to you, taking chunks of the cloud map and copying/pasting until you have enough that defines the coast and looks good.

[Mysterious Mapmaker XXIII]

Thanks, but at this point I've already decided to use a variation of the method Savage Orc used. I'll split the map into pieces, perform the threshold separately on each, and put the pieces back together prior to the final hole-filling.

My questions now are, how do I split up the map and how should I set the thresholds on each? I know higher threshold = rougher coastline; I just want to know how high to set the threshold for what coastline.

[antillies]

After just a brief look over the updated tutorial, it seems like you can probably use the method per continent, though I would test it out. As to what you should set the threshold at, it's probably just easier to play around with it and see what looks best to you. If you're looking for direction in that regard, I would say to take a look at real maps or real coasts (Google Earth), or peruse the boundless number of maps on this site and find a coastline pattern you like and go from there. There's really no hard and fast rules when it comes to stuff like this.

[Savage Orc]

One way I figured out my threshold was just trying something and if I didn't like it just undo it and try another setting. Also fiddled with the Gaussian blur too.

I used this method also to distress text for my part of the guilds 10th anniversary map.