(noob) FTPro: how to set an area to a fixed altitude?

[teef]

ok, i'm sure i'm going to feel like a dork when i find out how this is actually done but ...

i have a world i like a lot in FTPro except there is a big, deep divot in the middle of one of the continents that i'd like to turn into a flat grass land. so i'd like to paint the whole area to, say, 1200 ft +/- 100 feet.

after much document reading and tool findling i find I basically don't know how to do this efficiently. too noob to know what i don't know here.

i can paint and paint and paint with the 'raise' tool but that seems totally lame and gives weird results anyway. what i'd really like to to do is just set the paint to an absolute values, '1200 +/- 100' or whatever, and have at it. or select the area with the polygon tool and do the same, one shot, fixed altitude set.

any suggestions from the FT savvy crowd? many thanks!

[jfrazierjr]

I don't have an answer since I don't use FT, but the developer is a member here(Waldranate(sp??)), so if no one else beats him to it, I am sure he will pop in and answer this question within a few days.

[waldronate]

Select the area and try Tools>>Global Set>>Altitude or some such (I'm not at my computer at the moment so I don't have a way to check). FT will then try to get the area within the selection realtively close to the value you specify. It on't be perfect for any number of arcane tachnical reasons, but it should be fairly close.

[Greason Wolfe]

I think, and I could be wrong, that the closest you can get to accomplishing that is to use the freehand selection tool, select the area in question then go to Tools>>Global Set>>Altitude Value. It's not a perfect solution and you may have to play with the "Samples per Cell" setting. The only drawback to this that I've found is that the roughness of the area in question may not flow through as well as you'd like.

As jfrazier said, however, Waldonrate (as the software developer) might have a better solution than this.

GW

EDIT : Teehee, see, there it is, he already posted the same thing.

[teef]

thanks for the replies guys. it's gotten me quite close to the goal.

i found that using Tools>Global Set>Altitude in a number of steps with increasing altitude did help change the great sinkhole into an area of pretty rough terrain (say a given elevation +/- 1000 feet, all choppy and uneven). there didn't seem to be any settings that would actually flatten the area out.

some time with the "smoother" and a bit of tweaking more or less finished the job.

FT is pretty cool, sure fires the imagination. thanks again for the assistance.

t.

[waldronate]

Hmmm... Set Altitude should have done it in one run. It computes the world as it is now, figures the difference in height for each point and sets that difference as the new editing value.
I always recommend upping your editing resolution as it makes the editing a bit easier to control.
Check out http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/CGTutorial/index.html if you haven't already.

[teef]

aha! very promising looking tutorial. many thanks for the link, and the advice re editing value. i was using FT pretty much out of the box which appears to not the ideal choice.

t.

Later: can't thank you enough for the link to the tutorial, _incredibly_ helpful!

[teef]

Hmmm... Set Altitude should have done it in one run. ... I always recommend upping your editing resolution as it makes the editing a bit easier to control.

ok, did the edit resolution thing per the tutorial (bumped it to 4096) and you are exactly right, Altitude Set now flattened the selected area in a single go! many thanks!