City designer 3 Beaches/coastal towns

I'm Learnoing CC3/CD3 on my own here. i have watched some vid tutorials as well as done some pdf tuts. but now i'm on atime crucnh for my RP game i'm hosting and i need 4 maps done 2 are coastal. and i cant figure out how to make some beaches that look very good.
I'm running into the situation when i add an outer glow with x color where the ocean goes off the side of map it looks funny it likes fades of and looks tapered. then i wanna ad some effects in the water to give the effect of shallow to deep, i tried an inner glow for that with a light blue but it gives a nice effect where the beach is but it goes around the boarder of the map. i'll give an example jpg. i did it to the extreme so it stands out what i'm talking about. looking for semi realistic beaches. Thanks.

I drew 3 contours, one using the Background Stone 2 Fill and the other using different shades of water. This shows no effects, but I used edge fade and glow on the water and the background sheets and that looked pretty good. You have to tweek these effects to your liking and it will take some patience.

The almost spot on what i'm looking for. Where is the drawing Contour tool? Also when i manualy draw the contour and add the edge fade, i'm not seeing the 3 contour to blend with edge fade, inface i'm not seeing the fade efect at all. Thanks! ok another Question i saw some CD3 maps with Nice cliffs. and i'm shooting for a lighthouse on a harbor Island and on 1 side i want some cliffs. and the light house is going to sit on the edge.

There is an icon, 2nd column on the left, that has a hammer crossed by a pencil, right click on this icon. This will open up the drawing tools. If you click the advanced button on the bottom of this dialog window you can create your own drawing tools. I created a smooth polygon filled using a bitmap fill. Hope this helps.

Yes that does explain a bit better. thank you. as for a few more questions on the subject befor i change over to part 2 of the coastal creation. Lets say i Layed out water before, can i COPY the Ocean I've already created. Make a copy of it and edit the properties as in change the fill style , change sheet its on, then scale it larger. With out having to redraw it? Because i Really like the style ocean port i have made.

Now on to part 2

On this coast i want SOME cliffs, I've seen some interesting maps with cliffs. i was looking in the forums for galleries and such and i came across this post of some one that did an awesome job for a first time. any how he had some cliffs on there and it almost looked like it was a model or something used to draw em. I'm shooting for a cliffed island for my light house and some of the coast i want cliffs.

the icon under the eyedropper will let you change the properties of an entity. Click the icon then select the entity, the right click and "Do it". here you can change sheet fill color, etc... to make something larger or smaller use the scale tool (look like a rectangle getting bigger, icon on the left). I am thinking about the cliffs, there are many ways to do them, and I think I'll need to draw one up and take a few screen shots.

I'll try and do it tomorrow.

ok the blending of Water and beaches is done, i added a few effects to. I made 3 new sheets. BEACH, OCEAN SHALLOW, and OCEAN DEEP. I added an edge fade, inner to all 3. tweeked settings a bit and added 2 glow effects, 1 to ocean shallow . i added gray to make it look as if the beach was wet, and then i added a beach glow to blend it into the grass. all and all it came out very nice. now all i gotta do is cliffs and i think it come along nicely. haven't decided on what city wall shape , and where to began and end. but we will get there.

When I make City maps, I do not like playing with 'uniform' settings, i.e. Using just glows, etc to simulate things like beaches, grass, etc, but prefer to use shapes that then have these effects applied.

Below is a closeup of a city, Deestan, that shows the beaches/etc without the effects on,and then the same with the effects on.

I just added a contour above the beach and under the water and place lines to show height. This is really rough, but i hope you get the idea. You will have to mess with the line width, in CC3 it is in paper dimensions, so as you zoom in and out the line stay the same width.

I did a little tweaking of my own.

http://www.sangson.com/blog/wp-conte...urin-beach.jpg