Profantasy Software: Adding details to many levels of the same map

[Denalz]

Okay, so let me try to articulate my problem as coherently as possible...


I bought Campaign Cartographer 3 Plus (CC3+) a couple of years ago. Now that I'm actually DM'ing a D&D game I'd like to make maps for my home-brew game. I bought Fractal Terrains (FT) and what I hoped to be able to do was start by making an entire planet with FT, export the files to CC3+ to add continental/country detail, and then export those maps to eventually add in village level detail with City Designer(CD). Is this level of comprehensive detail even possible? I have scoured youtube looking for tutorial on how to do this but I'm just not finding the information I need.


My main hang up is that I want to be able to export particular islands and land masses generated on a world sized maps to the exact shape and scale across all three levels of detail so that it stays consistent. I can't be the only one who has desired this. Can anyone help me? I'd be very grateful!

[Grymmly]

I'm interested in learning this as well.
Fractal Terrains does have a way of exporting multiple levels of maps into CC3 format, but beyond that I have no clue how to keep zooming in to do smaller regions, or towns/cities.

[waldronate]

One of FT's strengths is that it keeps its world data on a globe. That globe can then be reprojected as desired and output to CC3 for more detailing. Individual map segments will be based on the same information as the original whole-world map and so will be consistent across zoom levels (allowing for distortions produced by the map projection, of course). FT offers a view management system that allows you to zoom to a particular view on the globe and save that view in the FT file for later use. This technique allows you to set exact projections and scales for a whole set of output files.

FT also offers an "Export Multiple Files" feature, but I strongly caution against its use. Aside from a few bugs with the output, that particular feature doesn't offer any control over where the individual files get split. It's easy to generate thousands of useless maps in just an hour or two. It does offer some nice things like automatic linking of the output files, but the other problems far outweigh the benefits. I'm not sure what the guy who wrote that bit of code was smoking, but I sure don't want to smoke any of that every again.

Some of FT's fractal facilities start to look ugly as you zoom in close, but there are a couple (RMF with Perlin's Improved Noise, for example) that can be rigged to zoom in to generate a map that's a mile or so across. Most of the others start to show serious artifacts as the map gets smaller than a couple hundred miles across. What you're going to do with the map will dictate how badly the limitations affect you.