Fractal Terrains tools a little wacky

[Girltron]

So I figured out the gridlines. That part's good. The lasso-global-lower-temperature thing didn't work out so very well, because all the uneven spots within the selection area stayed uneven and still needed to be sort of pixel-painted individually, and of course the level of detail isn't great though my editing resolution's quite high, so I can't fully repair the area. There's a stupid half-moon shape of spots left and I can't change them without altering the surrounding climate too...so I'm leaving them alone. Fixing the climate globally would work but I just don't have the stamina. I don't think I could do a great job having to adjust ALL of that anyway.

What FT seems to need is a way to dial in the settings one wants in selected area. Just type in the temp/rainfall/elevation settings to be applied to the whole selection. Right now the only tools allow you to type in the DEGREE OF CHANGE which isn't helpful if you need to even out an uneven area. Fixing anything takes much longer this way than it needs to.

[waldronate]

A way to get rid of the extreme points is to do a global set to 0 and then raise and lower them with the selection. Be aware, though, that such an operation will undo the painting that you've already done.

What FT really needs is a tool that lets you say "paint this area in climate type X" and the software figures out the minimal change needed to get that climate. The problem (or binus, depending on your point of view) is that there will be bands of intermediate climates around the painted area. For example, forcing a tundra area in the middle of a tropical rainforest will lead to some odd climates over a very short area.

A better climate model would be nice, of course...

[Girltron]

I don't think the global set to 0 will work; I tried that with a selection instead of doing it globally and it subtracted the difference from all the temperatures, such that the spots were STILL there but at a lower temp than the surrounding area, which also wasn't at 0. It was variable all through the selection. Places were as low as -400 F and as high as 0. Crazy. I just hit CTRL-Z and decided to ignore the spot, as much as it irks me.

I'm not convinced it wouldn't do the exact same if I did that globally with no selection; if I changed the world settings I think that would randomly generate a brand new world at 0F with the rest of my parameters in place. Which is not what I want.

In the end I guess since I'm exporting AND tracing I won't worry about it. I'd like the FT product to look professional and finished, but I'll just have to learn to live with it.

[Robbie]

I agree, sometimes I wish I could keep the FT file as a "final" map that contained everything. If one of these software company's would put all of these programs together into one suite that worked well together it'd be fantastic. I'd like to see a program like FT that handled plate tectonics, wind and water currents, continental drift, etc...but alas...we have to overnerd ourselves to come up with that kind of data.

I ended up exporting my regions to photoshop using HandsomeRobs tutorials and got some really good results. Even though he was aiming for illustrator, I was able to use his export techniques to make some really useful photoshop bits and pieces.

Best part of all this thread is that the developer of FT not only hangs out here, but is posting in this thread! If only we could prod him to quit his day job and work on FT for us solely. *eyeballs joe*

[waldronate]

If global set to 0 is causing a problem then it's more likely that there's a problem with the altitudes at those points. In FT temperature is inversely proportional to height.

If ProFantasy could sell 25,000 copies of FT every year I'd be able to afford to quit my day job and put in that extra time on the product.

[Girltron]

Well I'll keep buying upgrades and hopin' for ya! I'm trying to decipher what you mean by a "problem with altitude" because potentially I created a lot of problems while I learned the tools. The areas are small lower spots in the terrain but not THAT low. Still thousands of feet above sea level.

See, this descends from the issue of the tools going wacky on me. It might be the spot on the globe, or the computer it's running on, or the evil fairy I angered last week. Either way, I have the occasional interesting effect like this:

Elevation tool suddenly reverses effects so "lower" actually raises, and the smaller the value I plug in the larger the effect it actually has. Simultaneously the size of the brush begins to increase at faster and faster rates immediately after I've clicked the mouse, such that the spot keeps growing (or shrinking) until I close out the program.

After which it'll work like a charm for a good long while.

The first times it did things like this, I didn't recognize the problems right away and I'm sure I saved with some wackiness still in place which I manually repaired later.

[Girltron]

I vow not to use the word "wacky" any more. Sorry.

[guyanonymous]

I was thinking that "wacky" was a much more polite word than I was using with my FTPro woes.

[Girltron]

I've decided this world I'm painting on is for test purposes. I've learned a few things as I've gone along, enough to want a complete do-over with better info to start. I'm inclined to model the climate totally manually too, I feel like it'd be a cleaner process and teach me more about this world.

Why does FT want to route rivers through my deserts, or originate them there? The only rivers that'd show up at this kind of resolution must be enormous ones, and some of the areas they end up just don't seem likely to me.

[waldronate]

Deserts form where evaporation greatly exceeds rainfall. FT doesn't model evaporation or movement of air masses so it only works from the rainfall end. It determines the amount of water that would land in an area and the downhill direction then lets the river flow. The consequences of this model are that rivers never disappear and always find their outlet (a pit with no outflow or a place with the water level above the land level).

Even though there are rivers that flow through deserts in the real world they are much more likely to form in FT.