Deviating from Earth Norms in FT?

[Robbie]

Hi all.

With 4E out, and me being anal retentive about worldbuilding...I wanted to rekindle my Arsala efforts...Arsala is a smaller planet with 1 sun and 8 moons...

I plan on using FT to create a base map to work from, and then begging Redrobes to help me or let me use his software to do erosion and world color and whatnot like he did for the CWBP.

But I guess I should start here with FT...

Highest Peak: 19340 ft
Lowest Depth: -12309 ft
Circumference: 15433 miles
Rough: .87
Percent Sea: 60
Land Size: 2.31
Cont Shelves: -750.99
Axis Tilt: 15 deg
Greenhouse: 1.11
Method: Wilbur Ridged Multifractal

How did NeonKnight calculate averages and all that?

Also I was curious about Deserts? Does FT not ever generate any deserts?

Does this seem realistic enough or should I change something? or same settings and try a different seed? I kinda like the shape of this one...but I'm not married to it.

[RobA]

I am just growing to hate FT's "inland seas"

They just don't work, mentally, for me! I would expect anything not connected to the ocean to be "flood filled" to a higher elevation than sea level...The area's on the left continent would either be much higher (thus larger), or be much shallower (below sea level) if they evaporated faster than filling.

Any suggestion on how to manage this with FT, or third party tools?

-Rob A>

[Robbie]

I agree...I was going to fake it with rivers on the backend...but I don't know...

I'm very curious about RedRobes tools, and would love to give them a shot...

[waldronate]

http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/CGTutorial/index.html shows how to go about using the tools in FT to eliminate the more annoying areas. There are many other tools that aren't explored in that tutorial such as the lower water level painting tool (paint away those lakes) and the Actions>>Expand Land in Offset tool that expands land along the coasts, which tends to fill in those smaller sea-level areas.

On the desert front, FT was a little too optimistic in its placement of rainfall, making for worlds that are very wet. Combined with the static climate model in FT (no air current or water current simulation to move temperature and rainfall around), you're unlikely to get deserts unless you lower the rainfall level your self with the paint tool or lower worldwide rainfall.

The values shown for rainfall and temperature are already yearly averages.

[Robbie]

Thanks Joe!!!

Thats a great tut!

While editing, I ended up with a section that had like a big vertical gash in it, like a glitch...is there a way to prevent that?

[Robbie]

Here's another gash...Its messing up my mojo.

Is it the edge of the world??? Since I rotated it a little to center the land masses in equirectangular projection?

[waldronate]

Try to avoid the +180/-180 boundary on the world; there may be unresolved editing issues there for one pixel of width. There is also a known problem with certain operation (divide and exponent, if I recall) that can generate infinite values and the software doesn't clip those out so they propagate forever unless you select the area and set the value.

If your area of primary interest is across the +180/-180 boundary and that's the part that is causing you problems, you can rotate the fractal part of the world relative to the underlying edit grid using North Pole Position.Longitude on the Secondary editing page on the World Settings property sheet.

The first picture shown below gives a world with a bad split right across the only land mass. The second picture shows the same world with the fractal part rotated 180 degrees so that the land mass is centered on 0 longitude rather than 180 longitude. Note that doing this doesn't move your editing.

[Robbie]

Excellent...I managed to work around it...luckily for me I was able to 1 pixel edit everything near it and fixed all the big gaps...Though I hope when I get to the erosion and smoothing and rivers and whatnot, that edge won't cause me any grief...I've done WAY too much editing to change the north pole position now...unless you have any other ideas?

I decided to go with a different world. Here's a picture so far with all the editing I've done...I'm currently going around all the coastlines and getting rid of all the little coastal seas. Still more work to do...that tutorial is VERY helpful though.

[Robbie]

Got to the rivers part, and the edge problem seems to have reared its ugly head...bleh...any ideas now? left side of the two weird river lines is where the edge is...

Whats weird is if I zoom in so that both sides of the two weird lines aren't visible, the problem goes away...I'm guessing its a river vector problem?

Edit: Rerunning rivers with very fine resolution fixed the problem...nevermind...yay! Moving on.

[waldronate]

The problem with horzontal lines is a problem when subdividing the line segments to deal with the potentially curved projection. Using a projection with curved parallels should hide the problem that comes up sometimes as the horizontal lines as does recomputing the rivers at a slightly different resolution.

I dislike the default Equirectangular projection. I recommend the Hammer projection as a nice compromise projection. Also consider the Wagner VII projection or Orthographic (which looks like a globe viewed from infinity). Every projection has a purpose, you need to find one you like that meets your needs and use it.