FTerrains - Reconstruct heightfield?

[Sigurd]

I love Fractal Terrains and I am using it far beyond its designer scope.

Don't think this is a slam on a world building software when from the world you're carving off 300mile square pieces.

Basically the problem is this. To work well on home computers, FT has a fast method of generating landmass consistent with its usual viewing point of seeing continents from orbit.

When you zoom in on a place you get a reasonable image on your screen but it is not a bump map. The light is directional (so lighter is not higher) and there are a number of squiggles that come together to make the image.

This is what the uncoloured physical image looks like at roughly 300 mile square:




I thought I could smudge the image into something usable and I achieved this:



(I actually think thats pretty amazing for a 300 mile square chosen arbitrarily from a whole generated world.)

The problem is I cant make this work as a heightfield. This is what the smudged version looks like (with a little tan coloring). You can see the squiggle lines more clearly.



What I'd really love is some sort of mechanical process to convert the smudged map into something more like a heightfield.

Any guesses? Advice?


Sigurd

[Redrobes]

Why not just export the hight field from FT ? I thought that the issue we all faced on the coop world thing was that it could only do 8 bit ones unless you decode the bin file. Is the issue that 8 bit is not enough. What am I missing here ? FT is not my strong suite but I know it has the ability to export the height map.

[Sigurd]

If there is a solution it appears I will find it in Wilbur.


Thanks for the mdr suggestion.

Sigurd

[ravells]

Sigurd, FT does produce bumpmaps. I haven't got it in front of me but I believe it's View/Other Shader/bumpmap.

FT also produces normal maps too which is in the 'other shader' menu.

[NeonKnight]

Well FT uses the Willbur engine (if you could call it that).

Under the LIGHTING and COLOR option select the INTENSITY tab and adjust shadows to NONE.

Then under the MAP drop down, select SHOW OTHER SHADER > BUMP

This will give you a Greyscale image you could save as a PNG, and then import that into WILBUR if you want.

[Sigurd]

I have an older version of Fterrains but I've got lots to work with if I save the view as an MDR file and modify it in Wilbur.

Sigurd