Some fractal terrain questions

[Naima]

Yeh I u derstand , but notsure. For the feather , to make an example.

I select a perfect square , apply rise , I get a perfect rised square.

I select aperfect square , I apply feather 1 , the angles of the square become rounded , apply rise , I get a rounded square ...


But what I meant is that if I apply rise I should get a distance inside the borders something like a shape going toward the circle the more I rise the blurr wffect and thus not touching the borders of the selection , but in Ft , the borders are co sidered and if I apply for example a smoo over an irregular area with a square selection and a relative strong. Smooth , the results are a very visible cut on the rough area selected that is though smoothed , but the borders are very clear regardless of the feathering.

Also when I paint climates , Is there a way to paint more roughly and not perfect circles? Is also possible to insert new types of biomes? Like subtypes of deserts for example etc ... This not only in painting but in generation.

Also how those climates get generated? I see that in areas where I would expect deserts I get none , also considering that there are no rivers , adding em would change anything?

Do u plan to add some erosive filters to future releases ? Those of world machine would project ft really more into the future .

[Naima]

Another question ...

I was following the Israh tutorial ... unfortunately its not well specified the settings when he uses the incise flow because he uses a simplified coding like 8 1 4 5 etc ....

So since I read in his preface that he listed in the following order Blur Amount Flow and Blend I assumed that this shoudl be the sequence of his numbers and so I interpreted when putting in the window for flow ... in this sample I am selecting all of the world , apply then the incise flow as he stated ....

but on his world all goes fine in mine I get this weird result ... I did interpret wrongly his description or instead there is something else?

the border of my land here goes from 2000 m up I rised the sea as it was said in the tut etc ... here is a small passage quote ....

FRACTAL TERRAINS: Part 1,
Creating the Planet
Important

Any number of erosional combinations can be used for almost endless possibilities.
INTRODUCTION:

Fractal terrain's Incise Flow feature includes four settings; Blur, Amount, Flow Exponent and Effect Blend. You will probably be familiar with what each of these by the end of this tutorial but I will give a brief explanation in layman's terms.

Blur; controls the width of the incise or the pre-effect blur, higher being wider
Amount; relative depth of the incise, higher being deeper
Flow Exponent; severity of the incise, lower being more severe
Effect Blend; how much the effect blends into the terrain. Higher = more evident.

I have attempted to show all application tasks in an ordered format for the sake of comprehension. Number of settings will vary depending on action and will be shown in the order that they appear on the screen. These task sequences will be in red on a white background and usually, but not always, set apart from blocks of text.

This is a general example:
Name of Action: Selection (Value/Range), Feather (Value), Menu Name >> Menu Path >> Setting (Value)

For this planet, called Israh, I am going to do something unusual to give the effect that ocean levels have fallen drastically due to a severe ice age. I will achieve this by raising the sea level and re-apply continental shelves in the planet settings before I begin any erosion in Fractal Terrains. This is not something you would have to do on your average planet, but then, what is an average planet? Later, when the sea level is dropped there will be more of an oceanic or continental shelf look to what will be the coastal region and lowlands, while the highlands will have apparent effects of wind and rain erosion which occurred long before the current age of perpetual cooling set in.

My methods are experimental and satisfactory results can likely be reached in a more efficient manner. But experimenting is learning. One thing is for certain; if you weren't familiar with Wilbur or Photoshop prior to this tutorial, you probably will be afterward. This is a fairly long process so take your time and experiment as you follow along. Your settings don't have to match those of the tutorial exactly but hopefully they will help guide through this creative process. I apologize ahead of time if I failed to make things as clear as I wanted to.


Important

The primary reason that I do most of the aggressive erosion in Fractal Terrains rather than Wilbur, is that it allows for greater continuity between maps when output at different scales later-on.
CREATING THE PLANET:

Fractal Terrains will automatically create a random planet for you upon opening the program. You will want to adjust the settings according to your preferences and hit apply. You can adjust the Random Seed field to keep regenerating random worlds within your desired parameters. Your planet may not look exactly like mine as I may have changed my settings slightly after I captured these.
Settings:





This looks good to me...
Generated Planet

Once you have the planet looking how you want it, Save the Fractal Terrains file with the desired name. You do not really want to have to repeat these steps again if necessary so try and remember to save fairly frequently along the way, just in case. It also doesn't hurt to save out a separate backup copy of the file on occasion as well.

Take a moment to refer to: Tutorial for Cartographer’s Guild for more information on preferred planet settings and guidance on realistic continental forms. This particular planet will be mostly a single landmass so I won't worry too much about mountain placement in relation to the continental landmass.
Important

Israh is the smaller of two planets in a dual planet system with a circumference of just under 26,000km.

All erosional processes in Fractal Terrains are either done by hand with the Paint Lower>> Prescale Land Offset tool or the Incise Flow action which you will be using quite a bit. The key is to layer and overlap incises as they might appear in nature. This tutorial is not based on scientific research but is rather an interpretation base on the general rule that at lower altitudes you probably have wide smooth incises and as altitude increases valleys will steepen and get deeper.

Raise sea level 2000 meters, Tools >> Global Raise >> Water Level >> 2000m

Fill Basins: Select all, Tools >> Actions >> Fill Basins in Offset

Planet settings >> Secondary (tab) >> Continental Shelves = 300m >> Apply (button)
Incise Flow: Select all, 8 / 1 / 0.5 / 1

here the image

[Naima]

Also on the noise pattern , I used to generatet the whole world WM with perlin noise then edited all manually with the offset tools , but when I gocloser to down i see a lot of strange carvings in the surface that's not really looking natural , its there a way to "fix" those?



As u can see in the image on guide it looks different the terrain .

[Naima]

Another issue is that I am in no way beeing able to import decently a file from external tool into FT again , it always reads with errors the file both from Mdr in Wilbur and from Photoshop .

I followed the exact same steps , I have the heightmap but it doesn't load right in FT .

I tried saving both as png heightmap i 16 bit from PS and Raw format , both can't be opened fine in FT , Wilbur opens the Png but when I save as mdr also can't be read fine by FT .

[waldronate]

Yeh I u derstand , but notsure. For the feather , to make an example.

I select a perfect square , apply rise , I get a perfect rised square.

I select aperfect square , I apply feather 1 , the angles of the square become rounded , apply rise , I get a rounded square ...

This behavior is the correct behavior (well, it's how feather selection works in Photoshop and most other image editing tools that I've used).

But what I meant is that if I apply rise I should get a distance inside the borders something like a shape going toward the circle the more I rise the blurr wffect and thus not touching the borders of the selection , but in Ft , the borders are co sidered and if I apply for example a smoo over an irregular area with a square selection and a relative strong. Smooth , the results are a very visible cut on the rough area selected that is though smoothed , but the borders are very clear regardless of the feathering.

It sounds more like you want Select>>Modify>>Distance; this tool converts the selection into a distance from the edges of the current selection.

Also when I paint climates , Is there a way to paint more roughly and not perfect circles?

FT paints the precise brush shape with the current climate type. If you load an image brush, you can get any shape that you like.

Is also possible to insert new types of biomes? Like subtypes of deserts for example etc ... This not only in painting but in generation.

No. The number of climate types for painting in FT is fixed. Note that some of these climate type such as mountains and hills will not be generated by FT. They are for painting the map used in the Simple Create tool. Please note that I do not recommend use of the simple create tool for what you're trying to do.

Also how those climates get generated?

FT's climate data is computed from a yearly average of temperature and climate (unlike the Koppen classification, which also includes timing of rainfall and temperature). These average values act as lookup into a 2D table to determine climate type - http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/climateinfo.gif is the lookup table values. FT has the ability to generate a map with an arbitrary number of colors on that table: the image climate shader replaces the small number of values on the regular climate lookup table with an image. Each temperature:rainfall intersection on the table is colored according to the value read from the image. The Terraformer add-on that ProFantasy distributes uses the Image climate shader extensively.

I see that in areas where I would expect deserts I get none , also considering that there are no rivers , adding em would change anything?

FT defaults aren't the best. You typically need to add heat and/or reduce rainfall to get deserts. Again, FT's climate modeling is hardly worth the name. I always expected that people would paint what they really wanted.
Rivers in FT are derived from rainfall and have no impact at all on climate type. Similarly, there is no heat transport by air or water.

Do u plan to add some erosive filters to future releases ? Those of world machine would project ft really more into the future .

FT has the Tools>>Actions>>Incise Flow tool, which is a form of erosion. Tutorial for Cartographer’s Guild discusses use of this tool in the context of building a world.

[waldronate]

Another question ...

I was following the Israh tutorial ... unfortunately its not well specified the settings when he uses the incise flow because he uses a simplified coding like 8 1 4 5 etc ....

So since I read in his preface that he listed in the following order Blur Amount Flow and Blend I assumed that this shoudl be the sequence of his numbers and so I interpreted when putting in the window for flow ... in this sample I am selecting all of the world , apply then the incise flow as he stated ....

but on his world all goes fine in mine I get this weird result ... I did interpret wrongly his description or instead there is something else?

the border of my land here goes from 2000 m up I rised the sea as it was said in the tut etc ... here is a small passage quote ....

I expect that he intended the order of those values to be as in the previous version (blur, amount, exponent, blend). 8 is a huge blur radius; I expect that he used a much higher editing resolution than you have here. Please refer to Tutorial for Cartographer’s Guild for suggestions on how to use the Incise Flow and related tools.

Having an Amount of incise flow much more than 2 will basically destroy your world. Having a flow exponent below 0.2 or above 1 will likewise eat virtually all of the affected area. Having blend above 1 will also destroy things. Put them all together in excess and you'll get this weird bumpy thing like you showed in your screenshot.

[Naima]

thankyou ... about my latest question? I found this tutorial u posted a while ago . but the direct method u posted befoure doesn't work .

First thing you'll need to do it so convert files into a straight uncompressed binary format. The simplest way to do this is to use Wilbur, as Greason Wolfe suggested. Open Wilbur, then use File>>Open and select your GIF. Use Surface>>Map Info and set the Top to 90, Left to -180, Right to 180, Bottom to -90. Now use Surface>>Rotate>>Flip Vertically to flip the world data vertically. Then use Filter>>Mathematical>>Span with a Low value of 0 and a High value of 11000 to rescale the terrain to approximately real values from its original 0..255 grayscale values. Finally, use File>>Save, select MDR Surface as the file type, enter a file name, and click Save. Click OK on the "Enter MDR File Save Parameters" dialog. Exit Wilbur.

Now you will have an MDR file full of values ranging from 0 to 11000 meters and flipped vertically to compensate for a difference of opinion between Wilbur and FT regarding how data should be represented in the file. Using an MDR file and the extra work done in Wilbur will ensure that the data is described well enough that FT can easily ingest it.

Open FT, and use File>>New. On the Type page of the new world wizard, select Binary File and click Next. On the Binary Data page, click the Choose Elevation File button to bring up the Binary Data dialog. Now enter the name of the MDR file you saved from Wilbur (the ... button will let you pick it - you will need to change "Files of Type" on the Open dialog to "All Files"). Click OK on the Binary Data dialog, then click Next then click Finish. Your terrain data will appear in FT. The file you indicated above is relatively low resolution and only has 255 gray levels, which will make its reproduction in FT a bit low resolution.

See also http://www.google.com/#q=import+bina...Terrains&hl=en for more information on this topic.

If you intend to modify this data in FT I do recommend upping the world editing resolution using Map>>World Settings and setting a custom editing size of 2048 in the Editing tab. Follow this up with Tools>>Actions>>Burn Into Surface and then you'll have data in FT without any external dependencies.

As far as the speed and user interface of FT goes, yep, they are slow and elderly. FT was conceived in 1997 as an offshoot of Wilbur focused on making FCW files for ProFantasy's CC2 product with first product delivery in 2000. At the time of its development, a P2-450 with 256MB of RAM running Windows 98 was the hot thing. It has no hardware acceleration for any of its graphics and its algorithms are not optimized for a modern processor architecture. I do understand your frustration with the sometimes arcane way of doing things, especially by today's standards.

But how about this?

Also on the noise pattern , I used to generatet the whole world WM with perlin noise then edited all manually with the offset tools , but when I gocloser to down i see a lot of strange carvings in the surface that's not really looking natural , its there a way to "fix" those?



As u can see in the image on guide it looks different the terrain .

Also whats the maximum file size that WB and FT can handle? I tried to import a 20x10 k file in wb and worked but I can't save them out .

[waldronate]

You mention that the listed steps "don't work." Would you care to elaborate which step fails? Depending on the age of that tutorial, things may have changed in either Wilbur or FT or both.

As far as the visible squiggly bits go, it's because you don't have enough octaves of noise. You're starting to see the underlying fractal function poking through. If FT had been implemented properly then it would be dynamically adjusting the number of octaves as you zoom in and out to trade off execution speed for quality. However, it's a static number of octaves, so you need to adjust it until you see the squiggles go away.

FT's binary world is limited to source data with a maximum size of about 1GB on disk (that's a hard Windows limit on memory-mapped files in 32-bit). Regardless of the resolution of the binary data that's stored on disk, FT is still limited in what it can export.

[Naima]

The step that fails is the Import I did all exactly as u listed on the raw file saving format , I have edited then resaved in 16bit raw , opened the file imposing the correct numbers , the top 90 the left -180 , the lsb etc ... loaded up and then I get not correct map .

btw is there a way to paint in a single height level ? Like brushing 1 pixel wide for a whole lenght and have it always put the land to -1 m for example? thinking of this to draw precise coast or river flat .

Or is there a carving in that I can use to create as loped path for rivers? I can toing this manually but its hard to make the find rivers find exactly the sloped trail drawed .

[waldronate]

How is the map not correct? Is it completely garbled, stretched diagonally, or suffering some other failure? A screenshot of what you are getting (along with one you started from, ideally) would be helpful.

FT doesn't have goal-seeking for altitude or climate data. Those are things that are on the list to do, but haven't yet been implemented.

I'm not sure about what you are asking with your last question. Fun With Wilbur Volume 4 may be of interest. The precise program is different, but many of the concepts are the same.