Before getting started it is important that you have some essential downloads:
- Beaches for Irregular Coastlines
- Goldiva's Mayor Mode Tropical Sea Set
- Goldiva's Mayor Mode Tropical Tree Set
-
Ocean River Mod (Water)
Note: When installing this mod, follow the readme closely. You can choose two water colors. One will show up in deep water; the other in really shallow water.
Some of my favorite Embankments/Walls:
Walls Pack 2
Getting Started:
The first step is properly terraforming the coastline. As you can see in the picture below, it is important to leave the water directly offshore of where you want your beach to be shallow. There are two reasons for this:
1) The reefs will show up nicer if you do this because of the ocean river mod allowing a different color water. The beach will not have a steep drop off to a strange texture appearance.
2) The second step is to soften the coastline. This is done is god-mode.You can go back into God Mode once in mayor-mode by hitting Ctrl+Alt+Shift and the clicking on the god-mode icon.
Also you can change the size of the god-mode tools by hitting Shift+1-9, with 1 being the smallest. I usually use about a 3 or 4.
You can also see in this pic that I chose a light green water for my shallow water and the blue for deep water:
The next step is placing the actual beaches themselves (they should be in your parks menu).
Something you will notice is that the beaches have an ugly line underwater where they stop and the ocean floor begins. We are actually going to use that to our advantage. Use Goldiva's reef pieces to place along that border. Don't be afraid to place a bunch.
You should get something that looks something like this:
You can see that the reefs act as a border to blend the beach and ocean. Also they will only show up in the shallow water near shore and then fade out as you move deeper.
Making it look Nice:
Now that you have your beach, there are a number of ways to make it look nicer.
- One thing that I find looks really nice it place a wall behind the beaches. Since the area should already be sloping down towards the shore from the softening, all that you need to do is level off a flat line using the road tile method:
- Placing single road tiles next to each other levels the surface to the height of the first. This method is used by many SC4 players to level surfaces for walls, sunken highways, etc.
- It is easiest to simply level the terrain height for your wall to the height of the flat land inland from the beach.
- You should get something that looks like this, with a nice flat surface to place your wall on:
- Now all that is left is adding the wall of your choice and adding trees/boats etc.
- The trees in fact do serve a purpose of making the transition from wall to beach look more natural, so use lots and mix of the types as well.
- Goldiva's tropical set contains some great ploppable boat props which can be found in the mayor mode flora menu.
- Experiment and have some fun.
Hopefully you should get something like this:
An Additional Example:
In this pic a different water mod was used, but again I used tons of trees along the border of the beach and golf links inland.
Why you may ask? It allows you to create an impression that the area is not built on a grid by blending the borders.
Most of all experiment and have fun!
If you have any questions about this article, please PM an admin.
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