[Award Winner] Creating Realistic Coastlines

[OldGuy]

I developed my own method of creating realistic coastlines. I'm very pleased with how it turned out:

Old Guy Gaming - Creating Realistic Coastlines

island-rough.pngisland.png

I'm ready to begin work on the actual map. My sketch shows the basic shape and dimensions that I want but the outline is too smooth. I wanted to rough it up to make it look more realistic. I looked through various tutorials but everything I tried distorted the original outline more than I wanted. Probably the result of my being new at this and not following the tutorials properly.

I kept at it though until I hit upon a process that I'm pretty happy with. This was done in Adobe Photoshop.

I started with my island in white and the surrounding area in black as shown in the first image.

* Filter | Noise | Add Noise (gaussian, monochromatic, set to 100).
* Filter | Blur |Gaussian Blur (set to 2).
* Image | Adjustments | Threshold (adjust to taste). *
* Select Magic Wand Tool, click in black surrounding area. (contiguous checked)
* Shift-Ctrl-I to invert the selection
* Fill with White. (contiguous unchecked)

That's all there is to it. Now I have the beginnings of my very first Photoshop map.

* -- Move the slider to the right. You want to eat away at your landmass. Don't worry about how the land looks at this step. We will fill it back in. We just want to roughen the edges. By creating "holes" everywhere, we are trying to let the outside creep in a little bit. If there are too many holes, the outside will never hit anything to stop it. You want just enough holes to let it creep in a little but then run into a boundary. You may have to undo and try different amounts a few times to get the effect you want. Once you've done it once, it will be much easier to do than it is to explain. : )

EDIT: There is an updated version of this tutorial at Old Guy Gaming.

[Ascension]

I'll have to try that.

[Djekspek]

owh thats a real good trick! This will be a time-saver for sure! thanks for posting

[ravells]

Now that is really clever....got to give it a go. Any chance you can cross post the method here rather than just a link? It's just that if you decide tomorrow to go to the Far East and collect butterflies, we'll have your method recorded here for prosterity.

cheers

Ravs

[OldGuy]

Any chance you can cross post the method here rather than just a link? It's just that if you decide tomorrow to go to the Far East and collect butterflies, we'll have your method recorded here for prosterity.

I don't expect to be doing any more butterfly collecting. But I edited my post so it has the info and not just the link now. (I was too lazy to figure out how to use image uploads with lightbox but I got it sorted now)

[waldronate]

Nice work. Do the same sort of thing for mountain outlines and apply a shapeburst to it and you'll probably get a fairly plausible result.

[OldGuy]

Nice work. Do the same sort of thing for mountain outlines and apply a shapeburst to it and you'll probably get a fairly plausible result.

Thank you thank you thank you for teaching me how to use shapeburst! That is amazing.

I took your suggestion and continued the same technique I used for the coast on other elements. This is pretty rough but it makes a good proof of concept and gives me a starting point.
island-colored.png

[ravells]

Hmm I can't seem to get it to work properly...what were the dimensions of the image you were using to start with? I think it may be a question of scaling the noise correctly relative to the image size

Cheers

Ravs

[OldGuy]

Hmm I can't seem to get it to work properly...what were the dimensions of the image you were using to start with? I think it may be a question of scaling the noise correctly relative to the image size

Cheers

Ravs

That is exactly it. My first drawing was 1440 x 830 @ 72 dpi (designed to be a wallpaper for my notebook). Last night I was testing to see how PS handled a big image as part of determining how big I want to make my continent map. I used 7200 x 7200 (24" x 24" @ 300 dpi) and made eight layers with clouds rendered on them. PS handled this very well. At 150 mb per layer that's a 1.2 gb drawing!

I then tried creating a sample map using the technique described above. The noise was completely lost at that scale. I spent half an hour with other filters trying to create larger noise "chunks" but wasn't very successful. Mosaic seems the most promising so far but I haven't found anything that I would call a success at that resolution yet.

EDIT: Maybe I'm slow and this is what you were hinting at, but it just occurred to me to create another drawing at a smaller res, apply noise, rescale the noise drawing to match your map drawing and then copy and paste the noise drawing into your map drawing.

[ravells]

Ahh that would explain it then...I was using a 1,000 x 1,000 ish drawing....I'll try it on the same resolution you used for your wall paper.