Fractal Terrains 3 Brushes
Heyo!
I've been messing with creating a map using a variety of tools over the past few months and decided to take the hit to my wallet and get fractal terrains 3. I'm quite happy with it so far but I just can't seem to work out custom brushes, does anyone have any tips? I mean, I get the idea and how to actually select a brush but my brush seems to cause some lag, is there a specific resolution I should aim for? Also if anyone knows of any brushes or general tips to make life easier please do pass them along :)
Painting in all versions of ft has always been a bit laggy. I want to say that ft rasterizes your input brush image to the size you specify, but it's been a while since I looked at that part of the code. There are some other features that can cause worse brush lag (automatically rotating can do it), but really large (1000 pixels?) will also cause some issues.
What size brush are you using?
I was using a brush I made in Wilbur using the island creation in fun with wilbur 6 (You mentioned it would make a good brush in a thread I encountered). Its a size of 512x512 and it seems to crash whenever I try and load it. The brush itself is a height bump map png so I don't know if that is part of the issue? Thank you for your response!
I can't replicate that behavior in FT3+ 3.5.3 (it loads PNG brushes and paints with them at about the same performance as other brush types). What version of FT are you using?
I'm using 3.5.4 at the moment. I'll attach the brush in question as well, I've likely done something wrong on my side.
I saw it crash once after I let it sit for a couple of hours, but I haven't been able to reproduce that (of course).
I don't think that you're doing anything wrong. Certainly, the brush file looks fine.
The brush engine in FT is a variant of the Wilbur one, and the custom brushes come directly from there. I don't recall hearing about folks using the image brushes all that often, but it's quite possible that they have been having problems and just never reported it before. Is there any chance that a simple brush would be good enough for what you're trying to do? All of the brush engines use the same backend internally, but creating the image can be done in several ways: a built-in function (Simple), a user-specified function (Expression) or an explicit image (Image). There might be corruption in the Image front-end processor that is causing some problems, which is why I asked if Simple might be good enough.
What size is your editing data for the world? FT has an ugly habit of copying the whole surface during editing, which is why it tends to be laggier with larger editing resolution. Region-Of-Interest preservation has always been on my list of things to do for Wilbur and for FT, but I never really expected them to live long enough for the effort to have been worth it.
Personally, I haven't used brushes much since I implemented selections and the Mound tool because I find it much more controllable to drawn an outline and then add a mound based on that selection. I do admit that brushes can be useful (and fun) for prescale offset editing work, though.
Thank you, and my editing size is 4096, which is pretty large so I'd understand why it'd crash. Maybe I should lower the editing size doing the large terrain work and up it for erosion and export? Anywho I think simple should be fine, I'm just trying to shape continents to have mountains in specific areas (By expanding landmass in certain other areas). I hadn't thought to try the mound tool, so I'll definitely give that a try. Any tips on how to do that successfully? And thank you both for the programs and your time and help!
Draw a selection using your favorite tool (the lasso is usually easiest to work with) around where you want the lowest edges of the mountains to be. The important thing about using the mound tool is to try to make the edges a little crinkly to avoid really straight spines. You should also use the Add operation when creating the mound to allow multiple things to stack. Stacking multiple mounds will often get better results instead of just using a single mound. One mound will have a single spine, but multiple mounds can get lumps wherever they cross. You can also draw your selections with multiple parts if that helps what you're trying to get. This sample shows one mound going north/south to get the main mountain outline and a selection in multiple parts to get some crosswise parts. Note that you can paint selections in other tools if that's more your style (white = selected, black = not) and then import those images as selections using Select>>Load Selection.
Also, 4096 isn't a particularly large editing resolution since FT3+ pushed over to a 64-bit program. However, "large" is always a relative term and it is mostly dependent on your machine. Lowering the editing resolution and increasing it later can work, but you need to be much more careful of artifacts when doing that.
Thank you for all of the advice! It'll definitely come in handy
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