Fractal Terrains painting

[satyesu]

On page 9 of this recommends "painting." Painting what and why?

[waldronate]

Tutorial for Cartographer’s Guild is the original of that tutorial.

The section "Painting" has subsections like "Use the prescale offset editing tools instead of the offset editing tools", "Use a light touch", and "Painting Toys", if that helps. I wrote that document in outline mode in MS Word and didn't see any need to put any body filler under "Painting".

[satyesu]

But what are you suggesting I paint? What's the purpose?

[Gamerprinter]

Apparently the painting is of the colors used for each terrain area - the browns and yellows in the mountain reaches, the light gray green of the hills, the green of wider plains expanse, as well as different shades of blue used to determine regions of depth in the oceans versus the grays provided in the base terrain depicted by landform generation by Fractal Terrains creation function.

[satyesu]

I'm sorry, I'm very inexperienced. Does that smooth out the terrain or just color it?

[Gamerprinter]

I've only dabbled with Fractal Terrains, so my answer isn't specific to that application, however, the smoothing of the painting is of the color only. You don't want to destroy the integrity of the terrain detail - that would be counter intuitive.

[Azélor]

painting is to elevate and lower the landscape (page 7) it has nothing to do with smoothing

[satyesu]

I'm trying to make a "realistic" world/planet. Should I even use this?

[Gamerprinter]

As a tool for auto generation of elevation in terrain, Fractal Designs is very good at creating very realistic and satisfactory results. There are many limitations, however. If you have some exact coastal border and shape in mind, there is no guarantee that the auto-generation will ever even come close to what you have in mind. Regarding the water level, only the sea and lakes of the exact same elevation are depicted. You cannot differ between high mountain lakes as distinct above what is the maps 'sea level' - all waters in Fractal Designs are at sea level only. Also rivers and creeks cannot be depicted at all. Though some narrow sea level channels can seem to resemble a river. If you'd want to include such, this would be done in some other program as a post Fractal Terrains process. Being far more comfortable with my geographic, geologic as wel as cartographic skills, I don't really need nor would prefer to use Fractal Terrains, even so, I think the results are still impressive and indeed "realistic" as you seem to want to know. For a beginner at cartography, Fractal Terrains is an excellent method of generating a believeable world, at least the start of one.

If I were to include using Fractal Terrains in my cartographic process, it would the start of a map only, and the post-production work would be done in GIMP, Photoshop, or in my case in Xara Photo & Graphic Designer, a vector app that can also do the job.

[satyesu]

Do you know of any tutorials/lessons on things like ralistically adding rivers and whatnot?