Editing a world map

[Deadshade]

You can certainly draw a canyon. I misunderstood that the lakes were intended to be at other than sea level.

Yes they do. The question is whether Wilbur "fills up" a lake with water when one or several rivers flow in automatically. I suspect that not because I understand that the fill basin command will precisely destroy any such basin ready to receive a river's water. So I must find a way to preserve the lake's location from being "basin filled" and in the end of the fill/incise loop render it blue by hand. Or perhaps there is a more sophisticated way I can't think of.

Here we have another misunderstanding on my part. The attached image may help a little. The important concepts here are the difference between height, texture, and selection. The Texture menu has several only slightly related functions on it and they are related only in the sense that they dirty up the texture channel. Another case of leaky abstractions, I'm afraid.

Indeed The sufficient and necessary condition for efficient communication is to have the same (or very similar) correspondence between words and concepts. As I progressed along this thread in establishing in partial domains a correspondence similar to yours, I learned much. Your page dramatically increased my understanding too - now the texture tab doesn't seem to me impenetrable anymore. I certainly still don't know what the individual parameters do but I have now a structured idea of the concepts instead of utter chaos. It is just formidable that you found the time to accompany me along the way. So thanks.

Now back to my basic problem with the V2 shader that I mentionned yesterday.

Here is what I get when I take my map linked above and do : Load the mdr surface file ->Texture->V2 shader


This might be a good Sahara image but not a planet.
So when I do V2 shader set up then Land colors, I see that the colors on the map correspond to the upper 5% or so of the Spectrum. The command apparently disregarded altitudes on the map and considered that for coloring purposes everything (mountains included) was very low around sea level.
Then I went in the shader set up and put 1 in the altitude parameter because I imagined that this would force the gradient to apply the color at gradient coordinate X to every altitude at X% of Max.
Well it took up a bigger part of the Spectrum (the tops of mountains became green) so it probably explained that the difference was due to the difference between the default 0.75 and my 1 in the altitude setting.
Now if this is right, it would mean that the gradient is not adapted to my planet - it produces a desert planet where forests exist only between some 60 and 80% of max.
If we applied it to the Earth, it would show forests only between 4 800 and 6 400 m. That is practically nowhere.

So if these hypothesis were correct, that would mean that I need to change the gradient and I tried to edit the color list. I saw there altitudes values of 0.25 etc till 1 and thought that I could simply change the altitude values by typing 0.1 instead of 0.25 etc and that way "push" the green to lower altitudes. But somehow I was forbidden to just change the altitude values so I gave up.

If the above is more or less right, how could I edit the color list ?
I dread some method where I should have to type in some array dozens of hexadecimal codes for colors ....
Of course the best would be if I could import gradients from Gimp because creating and editing gradients is extremely simple and fast there.

Supposing this problem solved, it stays that only a small part of problems is solved.
I could have a realistic altitude-color correspondence but as we already discussed earlier, the color depends also on latitude/climate.
So actually the semi realistic color array for a planet is not a vector but a matrix with altitudes in lines and latitudes in columns.
How can I solve this problem in Wilbur ?
I imagine that in FT3 it could be solved by using the climate color textures but I stay with Wilbur for the time being.

EDIT : I just found a function Histogram in the Window tab that I have never opened up to now. If it shows what I think it shows, then it is an extremely useful tool for a realistic planet. Clearly the height Spectrum of mine (corresponding to the map above) has absolutely nothing to do with a realistic planet. Instead of having a broad peak at very low altitudes (say 100 m) and then exponentially falling tail, it has a huge pointy peak at around 800-900 m exponentially falling to low altitudes!
I don't know how to eliminate the sampling of oceanic areas that swamp the land statistics but clearly this planet is a kind of high plateau (like a lower Tibet) everywhere with a few mountains and no Lowlands. It is then not surprising that only a very small part of the color Spectrum (namely the color between 800 and 900 m) completely dominates the planet.
As I applied the tutorial line by line, this would mean that there was probably (?) not enough erosion. I need 90% + of land below 400 m with a broad peak. Or so I think.

Actually wouldn't it be a good idea to monitor the erosion loops by looking at how it changes the statistics ?
To illustrate what I mean, here is a picture :
Attachment 68340