Editing a world map

[waldronate]

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 ?

It's an interesting bug/feature in the image overlay code. Colors are painted using the opacity of the overlay, so if you draw things onto an overlay at 100% opacity, it will be fully opaque. Changing the opacity of that image overlay to 50% and selecting a different color will draw that new color at 50% opacity on the layer. Changing the opacity to 33% and switch colors will draw at 33% (note that things will look a little weird on the overlay during painting). Switching the opacity of the overlay back to 100% will show the varying opacities. It's certainly not how it SHOULD work, but it's how it does work.

[Deadshade]

I did exactly what you wrote but didn't see the effect you describe and what I saw yesterday was also different from what you describe.

I created a selection, set a filling color and filled the selection. I obtained a uniform blob with sharp boundaries as expected.
Then I did several somethings I don't remember (I think it involved changing color and probably resolution but not sure) and the previous blob with sharp boundaries suddenly completely changed.
Suppose that what I had before was a yellow blob on green background.
Now what I saw was that the blob transformed in a mixture of individual pixels. Some of them were yellow and some green. But as they were randomly (?) mixed, the sharp boundaries disappeared. The center of what was before a unicolor blob (e.g all pixels same color) had now more yellow than green pixels and the boundary had more green than yellow. The pixels had only 1 of both colors and not the unique color obtained by mixing green and yellow like before.
The overall effect was a blurred quasi smooth transition from green outside to yellow inside.
I remember that I then varied opacity from 100 to 0 and the mixture of green and yellow pixels gradually eliminated the yellow pixels untill at 0 none were left. But during the whole process the "pixel mixture aspect" didn't change.
I did another selection with the new color (black) and the aspect still was the pixelized blurred mixture.

I then left FT3 and when I next returned and went to overlay, I was only able to produce unicolor blobs with sharp boundaries. Even if the blurring pixelized effect was quite nice, I am unable to reproduce it.
It surely is nothing I saw mentionned in any document/tutorial/help function.

EDIT :
I think that I found it. Or at least something similar. When I start with low resolution (f.ex 100x100) and 100% opacity, I get big squares of uniform color more or less filling the selection. When I set now resolution to 5000x5000, the squares boundaries become completely blurred. When I then decrease the opacity, the whole becomes more blurred.

[waldronate]

feathering the selection prior to fill might also work.

[Deadshade]

feathering the selection prior to fill might also work.

Ah thanks. I didn't use the "feathering" yet at all. I'll have to start experimenting with it.

[waldronate]

Feathering is just a blur on the 8-bit bitmap that is the selection. And the magic wand is just a floodfill on the selection bitmap. A lot of the magic of selections went away for me when I realized that they're just images and most of the operations are just mundane, familiar things with different names. It was a wonderful and sad day.

[Deadshade]

Feathering is just a blur on the 8-bit bitmap that is the selection. And the magic wand is just a floodfill on the selection bitmap. A lot of the magic of selections went away for me when I realized that they're just images and most of the operations are just mundane, familiar things with different names. It was a wonderful and sad day.

Well I am not yet there. Still discovering and Learning what is the best part. Of course I know that the background maths is relatively mondain but I don't do it for the maths
So as I acquired now a bit of the global understanding of the Tools on the market, I would like to ask you a more general question.
Given that my need is to import to some software a map I created previously by hand.
Given that the scale of the map is planetary.
Given that I need to edit it to make it look more realistical (so necessarily fractal).
Given that this need of editing extends also to colors/textures (smooth color transition from forest to hills from hills to desert ....)
And given that I can't abandon any of the 4 needs.

Which of the following software (I briefly tested a trial version of all of them, FT3 much more deeply) is best suited to answer these needs ?
-Fractal Terrain 3
- World Machine
- Fractal Mapper 8.0
- Gimp
- X that I have not yet found

I hesitate to add Wilbur. One one side from what I saw, esthetically Wilbur is the most beautiful compared to the above and works on planetary scales. On the other hand it is the only one of this list where I am totally damn unable to do a single thing with it and to understand a single command/parameter (with the exception of those I use in FT3).

[waldronate]

A map is an abstraction of a place (real or imagined) done by a particular person for a particular client to fulfill a need of the client. What tools are best suited to the task is largely determined on why you want the map (that is, what you'll be doing with it), when you want it, and the expected quality of your results.

There are times when the best tool for the task is a professional in the field because they can often get you good quality in a reasonable time frame. They can be pricey, though.

If you're planning on having a whole series of maps of different types (satellite-style maps vs. thematic maps with labels, icons, terrain type markers, and so on), then you'll likely want to do the work yourself. Usually that means that your quality will vary.

For general map-drawing purposes, you're probably best using a generalized tool such as The GIMP that allows you to do painting and labeling. You'll likely lose out on more specialized tools such as height field rendering and easy reprojection, but bump maps are simple enough for lighting and G.Projector allows for reprojecting rasters. A general paint program allows for blending colors and textures as well as labels and other markers. The only real limitation on using generic programs is that they require patience and practice to get good results. While a more specialized program harnesses the experience and abilities of the developers to get reasonable results without too much effort, a generalized program makes your results entirely your own fault.

It's not a great recommendation, I know. I have a suspicion that you'll probably find after a while that starting over a few times is actually very beneficial. You are likely to find that certain things get easier as you get more experience and that you can treat your maps the same way you would make crepes: the first one (or few) are for the dogs. The old adage is "practice makes perfect", not "keep tweaking your prototype endlessly".

[Deadshade]

I have a suspicion that you'll probably find after a while that starting over a few times is actually very beneficial. You are likely to find that certain things get easier as you get more experience and that you can treat your maps the same way you would make crepes: the first one (or few) are for the dogs. The old adage is "practice makes perfect", not "keep tweaking your prototype endlessly".

For me this is no suspicion, it is a certainty. It's like Learning always works.
As for the why, my main motivation is realism and scale. That's why I didn't contemplate f.ex CC3. I am not interested by labels, symbols and names. All that I have already on the handdrawn map, if I wanted to have a computer picture, the only tool I'd need would be a scanner. So basically "what I will be doing with it" is : watching a realistic picture of a world first created only by hand in 2D. A kind of check that the handcreated map looks nice, fits on a sphere and makes (physically) sense.

So I computed the spherical size of the planet that would bear these isles&continents and respect both the proportions and the climates (e.g jungles near equator, deserts at tropics etc.).
The result was a planet of slightly less than half of Earth radius. This is satisfying for an Earth like planet because it leads to ~ 1/2 of Earth gravity at Earth density and allows for plate tectonics. So the "Earthlike" hypothesis which was not trivially true when one just throws a few lines on a paper was confirmed.

So next I would like to see how this planet looks from orbit - say from 1000 km to 20 000. And for that I really need a software tool that can edit the map at continental/planetary scales by adding realistic shapes (coastlines, hills, mountains) and colors.
I am pretty sure that all my future needs will be the same. F.ex I thought of constructing the Middle Earth Planet (if it was not already done) using known 2D maps. I suspect that it may be inconsistent because we have a hint that Forochel is in/near the northern polar area and this will probably lead to a very small planet which will not have Earth like properties (gravity, climate, atmosphere, mountains) at all.

This is the reason why I asked the above question.
It is materially impossible that I learn even superficially all the software that I mentionned. That would mean years that I have not free and available.
So I asked the question to invest my Learning time (money is not really an issue but time is) only in one which would be most adapted to what I want to do.

[waldronate]

For what you're wanting to do, a mosaic is most likely your best course of action. Use something like The GIMP and a map like NASA's old Blue Marble or any of the newer ones (note that there are maps that vary by season, so you can get landforms with varying types of cover). Find areas that are broadly similar to what you want (e.g. coastal areas on a jungle, mountain range, etc.) and copy those out of the original source material and onto your canvas. Then rotate and scale to get the final parts that you want where you want. Fade and smooth out the edges of the pieces until they blend nicely and you have good transitions. You'll probably need to reproject the source material at times, but you can often get by with just scaling parts.

This technique has a lot of advantages:
* coastlines are all "properly fractal" if your map scales are similar. At the very least they are plausibly so.
* mountains are also reasonable.
* colors are appropriate for the terrain type and biome.
* it's fairly simple to do maps with multiple scales if you remember the source areas for your data. In an ideal world, you'd have a painting system that lets you specify the source data on a world map and that would correctly warp, rotate, blend things for you.

There are also a few disadvantages:
* source data needs to be scaled and projected correctly or things look awful
* source data with lighting or shadows looks odd when rotated and pieced together with other parts having different lighting.
* it's very easy to get something that looks like a patchwork rather than a whole; this effect is usually a property of time spent locating source material.

Note also that you can do this same process with heightfields if you really want a heightfield for some reason.

[Deadshade]

Thanks. I understand what you are saying and it would probably result in what I want to do. Of course GIMP has an extremely high number of simple options so is relatively easy but long to learn. I already looked at GIMP but rejected it because it fractalised nothing. So I will go back and have a longer look.

From what I tested, the best and easiest way to create a 2D fractal map was Fractal Mapper 8. By just using the fractal polygon function on my imported map, I had the whole world nicely fractalised, on scale and accurate in less than 1 hour. Besides the fractal factor can be adjusted by a slider and the coast changes in real time what allows to have just the right dose of fractalising. I could also create blended and blurred color fields pretty easily and fast. Sofar so good.
Of course everything crashes down when I want to go in the 3rd dimension e.g hills and mountains. The only thing I can do is to set stupid preselected low resolution icons what very efficiently destroys any realistic feel.
I won't even mention the trees which with my map scale were displayed 50 km high and large each.
The end result just looks like a 6 years old daubing crude triangles and circles on a high resolution earth atlas.

So indeed I need a height field but generated fractally above a selection. Like the mound function in FT3 but fractalised both in the x-z and y-z planes. This would avoid the round look of the FT3 mound function which stays basically round even if one uses noise on it. This and a function which gauss randomizes a color field around a prescribed color would give a perfect 3D fractal world with prescribed coastline and realistic coloring.

Unfortunately it seems that such a tool doesn't exist.