Terrain Smoothing in Wilbur

[antillies]

Hi!

I have a height map that I'm trying to edit in Wilbur. Specifically, I'm having difficulty smoothing/lowering terrain so that it is of a more or less flat/uniform height (Image 1). I'm essentially trying to flatten said terrain so that it becomes a flat plains region.

I've scoured waldronate's tutorials and the forum at large but I haven't seen or have missed any specific instruction as to how to manually flatten/raise specific portions of a map.

I've messed around with the various brushes and though the "subract"/"add" behaviors do lower/raise heights, they do it in a more isolated fashion rather than in one that is uniform. Subtract, at least in my usage, seems to have a bad habit of "eating through" the terrain (Image 2).

Any help in this regard would be much appreciated. Thank you!

[waldronate]

Use the Select Freehand (lasso) tool to pick just the areas that you want.
Select>>Feather with a value of about 2 or 3 to smooth out your selection.
[Optional] Remove the ocean areas from the selection by using Select>>From Terrain>>Height Range Between -100000000 and -0.01 with operation Subtract.
Filter>>Fill Set Value with the desired value and operation Replace to make the area completely flat OR Filter>>Fill Set Value with value 0.5 and operation Multiply to make the area half as high as it was without otherwise changing the detail (repeat if needed).


You could instead select altitude bands (say +1000000 to 1000, 1000 to 500, 500 to 0), feather those selections, and then multiply each band by a value to get things a little smoother overall.

Yet another option would be to use Filter>>Other>>Remap Altitudes to directly specify the new altitude shape (this option is a little fiddly and may likely require a few tries: make friends with the File>>Save (preferably MDR type) and Edit>>Undo operations if you want to go this route).

[antillies]

Thanks so much for responding and for the suggestions!

I didn't realize there was much more specificity to selection. That is actually incredibly useful and I think used in combination with Fill >> Set Value and/or Other >> Remap Altitudes will produce the result I'm looking for.

Only other question I have is that it doesn't appear that Selection >> Feather does anything for me. I tried increasing the value to something really high (100) and the only thing that happens is that the selection area itself becomes smaller but the terrain remains unaffected. Is there something I'm doing wrong?

[waldronate]

Feather smooths the selection; it doesn't directly affect the terrain. The value that you enter isn't in terribly useful units, but a value of 2 or 3 should be sufficient for most operations. Try doing a selection and then using Fill>>Set Value with replace You will probably see a very hard edge in the terrain across the edge of the selection. Hit undo, feather the selection and the do the same File>>Set Value. What had been a hard edge should now be a slope instead.

[antillies]

You are totally right (not that I doubted you wouldn't be haha). Both work like a charm.

Thank you very much for your help, waldronate!