How To Make Eye-Pleasing Realistic Beaches

Please PM STomnibus if you have any questions about this article.

Welcome to the first is a set of tutorials designed to help make your cities look more pleasing to the eye!

Before getting started it is important that you have some essential downloads:


-- Beaches for Irregular Coastlines

-- Goldivas Tropical Packs

-- Ocean River water mod

-- Goldiva Stuff II (Optional; Not on the STEX)

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.

Embankments/walls-I have included the links to some of my favorites:

Some embankment/wall mods.

Note: Everything listed above in bullets can be found in the modding or STEX areas of Simtropolis!

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 appearence.




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+shiftand the clicking on the god-mode icon. Also you can change the size ofthe 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 shouldbe in your parks menu). Something you will notice is that the beacheshave an ugly line underwater where they stop and the ocean floor begins.We are actually going to use that to our advantage. Use goldivas reefpieces to place along that border. Don't be afraid to place a bunch.You should get something that looks something like this. You can seethat the reefs act as a border to blend the beach and ocean. Also theywill only show up in the shallow water near shore and then fade out asyou move deeper.





Making it look Nice:


-Now that you have your beach, there are a number of ways to make itlook nicer. One thing that I find looks really nice it place a wallbehind the beaches. Since the area should already be sloping down towardsthe shore from the softening, all that you need to do is level off a flatline using the road tile method:

-Placing single road tiles next to each other levels the surface to theheight of the first. This method is used by many SC4 players to levelsurfaces for walls, sunken highways, etc.

-It is easiest to simply level the terrain height for your wall to theheight of the flat land inland from the beach. You should get somethingthat 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.

-Goldivas 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 STomnibus.