Editing a world map

[Deadshade]

MY GOD !
It worked I don't know how to thank you ! The key was in the mask creation step and I couldn't have found it by myself
I had to skip the first steps because my map is full of colors and symbols and I have only Paint so that I didn't know how to make this black and white map you started with.
An option would have to be to paint white by hand everything inside the coast line but that would take hours.
So I just loaded the PNG as is at the mask step and the coastline appeared Not very visible, just full of white pixels blinking but the pixels were on the right places so that I see exactly where the coast is.

Now the last problem which has indeed to do with resolution.
My PNG is 1960x1680 pixels.
But as I said above, the PNG covers a window on the planet of about lat (-50,50) and long (-60,60). This was because I didn't want to create more which was all ocean anyway.
Yet when I create the mask, it takes the PNG and spreads it over the whole planet, e.g lat (-90,90) and long (-180,180) what distorts especially the horizontal dimensions.
Is there a way that when I load the mask, the PNG is "read" only on part of the planet e. g lat (-50,50) and long (-60,60) ?
Alternatively if it is spread on the whole planet a way to deform it in such a way that it enters the specified window (e.g doing a vertical and horizontal homothety) ?

Again a million of thanks. When I finish, I will try to post the preliminary result here. I discovered a fun and interesting activity which I didn't even suspect 3 days ago.
Perhaps I'll even try to return later to Wilbur where I am definitely unable to do anything and don't understand what any single button is supposed to do.
Just anecdotically - I studied QFT (Quantum Field Theory) so am quite familiar with complex and difficult concepts and learn relatively fast.
However the feeling I have staring at the Wilbur UI, is MUCH worse than if I made a high school student read a paper on Quantum Chromodynamics.
I simply don't understand a word in Wilbur's UI and can't even remotely guess what clicking on any symbol should do (it mostly does nothing) and that is very frustrating.

[Deadshade]

Status update

In the meantime I resolved the window problem by embedding my PNG map in a larger empty square so that the map occupies exactly the window I want and reading it into FT3 after that.
Basically I have now everything in FT3 so that I start working on details.
For the time being the most annoying effect I have is that when I want to push a piece of land under the ocean, I select it then do global lower. This correctly drowns the land but new land appears exactly at the boundary of the selection curve.
The result is that I have a blue square and a green boundary line on the map and didn't find yet how to make the green square boundary disappear. Every time I lower something, new land appears.

Unfortunately as I still have the trial version of FT3, I can't save my work as JPG or PNG so that I can't show the progress.
If I may still ask a couple of questions I would also like to create a volcano. I saw that there is a crater function (didn't test it yet) but the problem I anticipate is that I will be unable to paint the interior red.
Is there a way to force a color on a selection but leaving averything else unchanged ?
I like the Earth colours but would like to change them on selected places like yellow for deserts and red for volcano.
Also there is surely a way to add semi-transparent clouds (the overlay buttons ?) but this for later.

[waldronate]

FT has two separate concepts: a heightfield (a raster of altitudes) that covers the whole world and a set of image overlays (rasters of RGBA pixels) that can occupy areas of the world. I misunderstood what you were asking for in the original discussion; I was focused on making the heightfield. If you open the image overlays window in FT, you can import your image directly into that and specify the bounding rectangle for it. Then you can paint the heightfield under that.

The image overlays also allow you to paint into them. It's a little clumsy, but it can work as a basic paint program. Create an empty image overlay that occupies the whole world at your desired resolution. Then paint into that overlay. You can also import a cloud image and set the opacity to your desired level.

One important limitation of FT is in its editing system. FT offers very limited editing resolution for editing the world and uses an interpolation scheme to avoid hard steps at the edges of the editing cells. The interpolation scheme used is a cubic one that's prone to ringing when the step is large. IT's that overshoot and undershoot that appears as lines along the edges of things. As pointed out in the tutorial, the global smooth operation will reduce the hardness of the steps and eliminate the ringing.

[Deadshade]

One important limitation of FT is in its editing system. FT offers very limited editing resolution for editing the world and uses an interpolation scheme to avoid hard steps at the edges of the editing cells. The interpolation scheme used is a cubic one that's prone to ringing when the step is large. IT's that overshoot and undershoot that appears as lines along the edges of things. As pointed out in the tutorial, the global smooth operation will reduce the hardness of the steps and eliminate the ringing.

Thanks. I can't make it work.
When I select a square around the area that presents those dots and lines of land that shouldn't be there and then select global smooth-Land offset (I keep the parameter 1 as I don't know what it does) it indeed smoothes the land inside the square but there also appears new land and new dots.
When I try to do a global lower then I get rid of everything inside but land appears again at borders.
When I try just lower (L) with the cross like cursor, it also removes the dots inside but new lines of land appear at the boundary of the cross like cursor.
Btw what you calll "ringing" is that effect that makes land appear at boundaries of a selection ?

EDIT : a few last questions

I am very grateful for your help and won't bother you more . At least untill Tuesday So that I may continue, I would like to ask 4 last questions.
1) Now that I have the whole world in form of plateaus at 100 ft and oceans at 0 ft. I would like to start with some details. Is there a way how to increase roughness (fractalize) of the the whole world so that it keeps all coastlines conserved (e.g not that half of a big isle drowns under water) ?
2) Is there a way how to avoid the apparition of lines on the boundary of a selection/cursor every time I use a (any) function ?
3) How can I do a mountain that looks rugged ? I naively tried the function "raise" but it apparently does nothing - the land doesn't raise when I left click on a spot. I can raise everything inside a selection but that just does another smooth plateau. When I try Global set - Land roughness edit it creates interesting things inside the selection but generally destroys the coast lines too.
4) What is the difference between Land Offset and Prescale Land Offset ?

[waldronate]

http://sosie.sourceforge.net/sosie_f...mp_step_1d.png (the green line) shows an example of the overshoot (or ringing) that happens when there is a large step in the data. The overshoot appears as a trench and hump along a boundary such as a selection boundary when a large value is used. The smaller the step, the smaller the overshoot. One important thing that you can try to prevent tiny islands appearing along coastlines is to push the ocean parts well below 0 (perhaps -100) to prevent the overshoot from breaking the surface. Also, Select>>Feather is useful to reduce the hard edges on selections. Note that you can save selections to disk to reuse them later for things like enforcing coastal boundaries (the saved selections look suspiciously like the masks I showed in the tutorial).

1) make sure to push oceans well below 0 (-100 or more). In the tutorial that I posted above, there is a lot of effort in preparing the flat(ish) world. It's done that way rather than using the "flat world" wizard setting to provide a little bit of texture on the whole world.

2) The lines along selections are caused by the interpolation overshoot described above. The most common way to remove them is to blur (smooth) the offset editing channel after making edits. Another effective way is to use the Feather operation on the selection before doing the fill. The selection in FT is implemented as an 8-bit grayscale value with 0 being "no effect" and 255 being "full effect". Feather is effectively a blur on the selection.

3) One quick way to get rough mountains is to use the Tools>>Actions>>Create Mound from Selection function. Use the freehand selection to outline the base of the mountains and then use the operation to create a sloping area within the selection (basically, the distance from the edge of the selection). The Gamma parameter is an exponential modifier to the distance function. Adding noise to that (Tools>>Global Noise>>Land Offset) will roughen things up a bit.

4) If you're not using the roughness channel for anything in particular, then the prescale channel and tools won't do anything for you. The final altitudes are computed as altitude=shelf((fractal*roughness+prescale)*fracta lscale)+offset. The fractalscale value is computed based on your min and max altitudes and the fractal function range (it's a constant across the whole world). The shelf function is an exponential function that's about 2 at or above the continental shelf level and 1/2 below that level. Note especially that the prescale values are inside the fractalscale multiplier, meaning that it's in an unintuitive numeric space. If I'd been smart, I would have used fractalscale on all values from the UI and made the numbers a little easier to handle, but I didn't. Most of the fancy tools use only the offset channel.

I should probably adapt that tutorial to show how to do the same sort of thing with Wilbur (edit: attached). I have a suspicion that Wilbur might be more useful for what you're trying to do here than trying it in FT. Updating FT is on my list of things to do, but I'm about 37% overcommitted at the moment.

[Deadshade]

Many thanks again.
Especially what you are showing in the Wilbur case is exactly what I would like to do. The problem being that as I didn't start with the black and white masks, I created the isles directly by hand in FT3 by loading the PNG map as is. Reading your pdf I am also more and more under the impression that Wilbur is better adapted to editing/transforming while FT3 is relatively easy and focused on creating random maps.
Of course most people who are interested by creating fantasy maps start to do so by hand and generally have an idea what they want so that the ability to edit a prexisting world is more important than creating random worlds which obviously will never be what they need.

So my world now only exists as a ftw file and I didn't find the ftw format in Wilbur and I can't load it there. As I have still the trial version of FT3 I can't create a PNG (or BMP) version readable by Wilbur so am stuck with FT3.

As I promised, I will resist to ask a question untill Tuesday but would like to make a comment which may interest people generally curious about marketing (e.g analysis of potential customers needs).
A new map software Customer will be basically like me last week. I draw maps, illustrate games, create game worlds. All this happens by hand because pen and paper is still the fastest and easiest creation tool.
Then one day one wants to increase the realism - have self similarity in the design. That leads to fractals.
5 minutes of Google and one finds 3 things : Wilbur, FT3 and X. The first is free, the second has a reasonable cost and the last is much too expensive for just a hobby.

OK let's try Wilbur first. After a half an hour of research no manual can be found. A fast check of the UI confirms that it is hopeless to do anything without a manual. One doesn't even understand the words on buttons. Exit Wilbur.
FT3 yields strangely the same result. Even if one has to pay for a complex and difficult software, there is no manual. There are some videos, documents and vague tutorials that show perhaps 5% of the functionnalities but nothing that would even remotely look like a manual. This is puzzling. How can one sell a complex software without a manual ?
X seems perfect. There is a manual, tutorial and the description of functionalities seems to cover the needs that one has. Unfortunately the price is showing that this is for professionnals who don't pay it out of their pocket.
So a person motivated enough (like me) will find that FT3 COULD be a solution provided that one is ready to invest a huge amount of time in forum mining and looking for every available scrap of knowledge.
A less motivated person simply gives up.
But even with that I am still hesitating to buy FT3 and if I don't then the main, almost unique reason will be that there is no manual. I know that there is the "help" function but it explains nothing in 95% of cases so doesn't provide any help either.
Just an example : there are mega tons of parameters to be set and one not only doesn't know what they do but what is their numerical range min,max. There could be for example 2 pictures showing the result with value X and the result with value Y. It is fast and easy to do that for someboy understanding well FT3 and to put it in a manual. I estimate a good FT3 manual at 100-150 pages with 1/3 pictures and 2/3 text. How long could it take ?
The same is of course true for Wilbur but as this is a free software, I can understand that there is not enough free time and thus the software stays reserved for a quasi professional "elite".

To finish this comment I would say that people running Profantasy Software would certainly sell many more copies of FT3 if they invested some (one shot) time in writing a real manual.

[waldronate]

I'm not familiar with "X". Do you have a link? And don't worry about the questions thing.

The original purpose of FT was to provide random worlds for CC2. I included a number of things beyond the original spec and I think that's what trips up a lot of folks. FT is a compromise between what machines could do in 1999 and what I knew how to do in 1999 (the basin fill and distance transform code, for example, were things that I didn't have any notion of back then but that have turned out to be very important for common terrain processing). There are still a lot of design decisions from back then that color what I can do with FT without breaking everyone's existing content. FT also has a number of experimental and not-quite useful features that probably should have been removed (Moundtain is an excellent example). BTW, I have heard a rumor that the demo version of FT might have a bug in its "Special MDR" file save code that allows you to output an arbitrary-resolution MDR file (a format the Wilbur can read). There are a number of tutorials out there for FT, but I haven't made a full link page for them ( Tutorial for Cartographer’s Guild is an example of one that should be linked better).

The original purpose of Wilbur was as a toy to try out image processing and terrain-processing things (well, the real purpose was a little darker, but I won't go into that here). In many ways, Wilbur is a lot like everyone's favorite toy, MS-Paint, with the limitation that it's grayscale-only and renders that grayscale image in strange ways. As a toy, documentation was always low priority. There is also arrogance on my part in giving away Wilbur for free: you get what you get and I'm willing to offer a full refund of what you paid me at any time (note that it costs me money to host Wilbur). I should definitely push together the links to the various Wilbur tutorials out there, though. As a toy, though, it's purpose is for fun and always takes a back seat to paying work.

The biggest single problem with FT3 and Wilbur is ultimately that they are part-time projects for me. I have a more-than-full-time job, a part-time job, and a family with small children; I just don't have as much time to devote to playtime software development as I'd like.

Note that ProFantasy has invested time in writing an FT manual. More than once, in fact. There is even a nice FT section in their "Tome of Ultimate Mapping" product and some video tutorials online, I think. I have found that the problem with writing a big manual is that (a) most people these days seem unwilling to read an actual manual and (b) that it's virtually impossible to cover all of the various ways that users want to use what is ultimately a bag of tools. Trying to show all of the variations on a command is a tough task, especially if a command doesn't make sense without a previous context (I have "enjoyed" quite a few irate users for various products over the years that want to know why feature X doesn't work as shown in the manual when they didn't read the preceding steps that established the necessary context). The original FT manual that I wrote had some sections showing variations on some of the less obvious commands (see the example below), but later authors seem to have gone more for a task-oriented approach and less for a catalog of features.

[Deadshade]

The biggest single problem with FT3 and Wilbur is ultimately that they are part-time projects for me. I have a more-than-full-time job, a part-time job, and a family with small children; I just don't have as much time to devote to playtime software development as I'd like.

Ah sorry, I didn't know that you were directly involved with Wilbur and FT2. That's what being a newbie does
I mentionned the X because that was something quite impressive what I found on the Web when I was in the phase of looking for some fractal software but when I saw the price I forgot what it was. Hence X.
Btw I confirm that I can't output a .mdr format from FT3.
When selecting .mdr format and clicking on save, it says "Error writing file C:\Users etc". I thought that it was because I had a trial version which prohibited readable output.

I do not think that people don't read manuals. Lazy and impatient people don't read manuals and the penalty is that they do bad work. Some very simple programs can perhaps be used without manual and Learning by trial and error.
However a software of a complexity of FT3 let alone Wilbur are simply impossible to learn by trial and error - it would take months (and I am optimistic here). The combinatory alone leads to thousands of variants to try, compare and remember.

In my world I had some progress with volcanoes , even learned now the overlay function so that the volcanoes spew red lava and smoke. The mountains are more or less correct but much too round and regular - I can't make them pointy and rugged.

As I may still ask I have some additionnal questions :
1) How can I fractalize coasts? They are too smooth, straight and regular now.
2) I tried to evaluate the parameters in the overlay function. Actually what it seems to do is to mix the overlay color with the underlying color. F.ex with yellow overlay and blue ground it goes from yellow (100%) to green (50/50) to blue (0%). Is that a correct understanding ? At one moment I obtained a rather nice blurred effect like colored fog but didn't note what I did so can't reproduce it again. Have you an idea what it was ?
3) I read somewhere that clouds could be added. How can that be done ? When I varied the transparency of a white blob from 0 to 100% above ocean, I only obtained variations from light blue to dark blue. Clouds is something else - where they are one sees white and where they are not or little one sees the sea in its unchanged color. The cloud's color doesn't "mix" with the sea's color.
4) Is it possible to obtain pointy mountains with crags and peaks ? Actually I'd like to obtain mountains that look like what one obtains when creating a random world but just by editing my existing world.

EDIT :
I have read the tutorial you mentionned but it is completely focused on making rivers. So it is again a partial information that should be called "How to make rivers". Besides it refers all the time to the "Prescale Offset Channel" that is explained nowhere and lead me to ask some posts above what was the difference between prescale and not prescale.
On the other hand the page you added at the end is something I would kill for
This is EXACTLY how a manual should look. Perhaps not every function would need such a precise explanation but the major that one uses all the time definitely should be explained like that.

[waldronate]

I am the author of both Wilbur and the various Fractal Terrains versions (FT started out as a version of Wilbur modified to ProFantasy's specifications).

I'm guessing that X was probably World Machine. It's popular and effective, but is focused more on local-area places. Wilbur is a generic tool that can generate height fields for whole-world or local areas, and FT is aimed more at whole-world things with a focus on outputting to ProFantasy's Campaign Cartographer series.

One of the misunderstandings that people seem to have with FT is its focus. FT is intended to deal with whole-world maps at typically a few kilometers per pixel, not at dealing with local-area maps. People keep wanting to make it go from whole-world down to backyard level and it just can't do that. If I were starting from scratch today I'd go with a multi-resolution grid approach to allow that kind of editing across scales without using a huge amount of memory. I mention this because at the scales where FT works well, things like individual volcanoes and mountain peaks don't really appear (if a single pixel if a few km across, then a feature needs to be a couple of times that size to show well).

FT was developed long, long ago, well before the advent of UAC and such security concerns on Windows. It makes the stupid assumption that it can write to its install directory, which is forbidden on Windows 7 and later. For best effect, FT should be installed to something other than the default Program Files location (many people make a C:\ProFantasy directory to install their products into because spaces in file names may also be problematic at times). The error that you mention is typical of the program trying to write to places where it shouldn't. It's on my list of things to fix.

As far as manuals go, I've found that people tend to break down into three very broad categories with lots of overlap: those who want a detailed feature catalog for reference, those who want a task-oriented tutorial list of the most common tasks, and those who feel that any software that might suggest that they read a manual should be immediately uninstalled (usually followed by scathing reviews far and wide about how stupid the software is and what idiots the people who wrote it are). The first group is typically 15% or less of the market, the next is 30% or less of the market, and the last ones are 55%+ of the market (the violently vocal ones are usually 5% or so of any given category). Both FT and Wilbur are glorified paint programs and the UI tends to reflect those types of programs. They can indeed be mystifying if you're not familiar with common features of paint-style programs. FT's dynamic projection capabilities are definitely mystifying for those unfamiliar with the concept ("Why is it distorting my map?"). FT's dynamic fractalization will definitely be alien for people unfamiliar with the idea ("Why aren't the pixels exactly there I put them like I put them?" typical follow-up being "Why aren't the painting tools as good as the ones in Photoshop?").

1) Fractalizing coasts is a common request. One way to do it:
a) Select>>Altitude Range:low=0.0001 and high=1000000to select all of the terrain above sea level
b) Select>>Modify>>Border with a value sufficient to select areas along the coast (5 may work well)
c) Tools>>Global Noise>>Land Offset with a value that you like (start with mean=0 and variance=100 or so and see if that helps)

2) The opacity slider is an alpha blend function (result=dst*(1-opacity)+src*opacity). It represents how much of the overlay is visible relative to the background, so your understanding is correct. One thing to watch out for is that the blending is RGB, which means that colors won't necessarily mix according to the classic color wheel.

3) Check out the Terraformer product from ProFantasy (a free add-on that works with FT). It should work with the demo version and offers many useful elements such as cloud overlay images. The cloud images in Terraformer are defined with varying opacity built into the map, meaning that you can leave the overall opacity at 100% and the clouds will still remain white.

4) For best effect, the CGTutorial that I referenced is a good one to follow. Use your selection masks to paint areas roughly flat. It'll be a tedious process, but it can be done. FT doesn't have much in the way of global tools for goal-seeking on the prescale channel, unfortunately. To get the fractal function to show through reliably, painting into the prescale offset is about the only way to go while keeping the character of the underlying fractal function.

[Deadshade]

I am the author of both Wilbur and the various Fractal Terrains versions (FT started out as a version of Wilbur modified to ProFantasy's specifications).

I'm guessing that X was probably World Machine. It's popular and effective, but is focused more on local-area places. Wilbur is a generic tool that can generate height fields for whole-world or local areas, and FT is aimed more at whole-world things with a focus on outputting to ProFantasy's Campaign Cartographer series.

.

WOW, congrats! This is quite an impressive achievement for a single person especially when you worked on it only part time.
And yes you are absolutely right, X IS indeed World Machine !
I was so impressed by the presentation, user's guides and the web site that I almost burned 250$ on the spot. But then it seemed after all a bit too much for just a hobby. Now that I recovered the name I still don't exclude to buy it just for fun but I digress.

I understand what you are saying about FT philosophy. And you are surely right about the resolution issues - it probably gives best results when you are at planetary scales or just a bit below. It is also true that most problems I had and have are connected to much smaller scales because I would indeed like to spend my time editiing and improving on let's say 10x10 km scales. Note that I am quite happy with my volcano which is hardly visible on planteray scale but rather nice on continental scales.

Your category definition made me LOL
So I belong to your 15% what surprises me because, as I said, studying quantum field theory (e.g understanding how things really work) without a textbook would be equivalent to wanting to fly by flapping your hands.
When I want to understand something (f.ex FT3), I always start by reading. For complex things reading 2 or 3 times. Only then comes exercising.
But if you say that 55% want to become Fields medalists by just discovering that 1+1=2 (base>=3) I am flabbergasted but have to trust you.

Thanks again for your answers, I am buying FT3 and will go for Terraformer as we speak.

One question more that I mentionned in the post above.
When using the overlay at one moment I did something that had for effect that the solid overlay color suddenly spread and blurred with the underlying color. It was not like the general case where the colors combine but stay uniform (what you get is a solid blob). On the contrary, the place looked like a mixture of pixels some of them overlay color and some of them underlying color. When decreasing the opacity it was the proportion of both colors that was changing but not the blurred , mixed look.
I found that it was really interesting because it completely blended the sharp boundaries of the overlay form with the countryside around it so that the transition from one color to the other was very gradual and looked natural.
Unfortunately I am absolutely unable to remember what I did and can't redo it again.
Does this phenomenon ring a bell ?


EDIT:
I have just uploaded the trial version of World Machine.
Extremely non intuitive UI - so here without a manual one is definitely lost. Extremely impressive, rich and fast editing at scales, say, tens to 100s of km. Plenty of options. Really excellent visual results. Nice color blending and parametring.
However very bad for whole world building. Didn't even understand whether it works or not. Poor choice of projection methods. Didn't even find coordinate grid (lat,long). Could upload my .bmp map but not on the scale I needed. Doing what I did with FT3 doesn't probably even work with World Machine.

However as a not yet 1 week old newbie I would say that FT3 for general world features, coastline definitions and projection choice coupled to World Machine editing for subcontinental lower scales would be a cartographer's dream .