Wilbur vs Fractal Terrains?
Hi!
I've gotten into mapping with Gimp and Wilbur, beginning to get where I can do what I want (usually to have a rough map of an entire globe and zooming in on parts of it to create regional maps). It looks like Fractal Terrains 3 would do some stuff for me, mainly create the first global map and keeping the projections working when working on flat maps.
Anyone care to say something about how a transition to FT3 would be? I see people working on maps using both FT3 and Wilbur, so it seems they complement, rather than replace, each other, but I don't understand how really.
Best,
S
They were both written by Joe Slayton (handle: Waldronate) who is a regular here. He would be the best one to answer your questions. I find FT more user friendly but I think Wilbur might be more powerful in the sense of being able to create your own (rather than randomised or DEM data driven) worlds....but Joe would know.
FT was designed to generate world and regional maps quickly and then export those maps to Campaign Cartographer (CC). It has a big chunk of terrain manipulation features, but the primary feature (for good or ill) is that FT generates fractal detail as you zoom in but keeps a fixed-resolution editing grid. Wilbur, on the other hand, is a fixed-resolution image processor with some tricks to make things look like terrain. FT and Wilbur share a fair amount of code, but processing that looks nice in Wilbur may not look as good in FT and vice versa.
Because FT keeps a fixed-resolution editing grid with fractal stuff on top of that, the final results may lack much in the way of detail that Wilbur can provide (especially when FT is zoomed in). Wilbur is good for adding final detail or for producing maps with a fixed projection. FT is good for viewing maps in different projections and for producing CC maps. It also has some ability to overlay multiple images at different scales on the world (it has some primitive image painting tools as well). Wilbur can support a single image drape.
I recommend giving the FT trial a shot to see if it does the sort of things that you hope it will. http://www.fracterra.com/CGTutorial/index.html offers some suggestions for working with FT. The ability to label views in FT allows you to reproduce maps or quickly spin to an area of the world (including a change of projection if desired). The image overlays and painting tools allow for adding guide images or for quickly roughing in countries.
Thank you both for replying! Yes, I was silently hoping for input from Waldronate himself.
A couple of questions...
What does "fixed-resolution editing grid" mean in this context? And the fractal detail that gets generated when you zoom in, is that temporary, for the zoomed in view, or is it added to the whole piece (or does the way it work render this question irrelevant?)?
I only tried CC a bit a year ago, never really got into it (maybe I should look at it again). Can FT also export something I can use in for example Gimp, like Wilbur does, or is it more exclusively tied to the CC ecosystem?
I'm pretty sure I'll buy FT either way just to try it, but a free trial sounds great! Can't open the fracterra link though, it just opens an empty white page for me.
I apparently am not smart enough to have set the web site up correctly (or something like that). http://fracterra.com will show the top-level page with a picture of a cute kid, but nothing below that seems accessible at the moment. Bleh. One more thing to fix that had been working just fine...
FT uses a single editing grid that stretches over the whole world. You can set the basic editing resolution. So, for example, if you set the editing grid to 4000 pixels wide and your world is 40000km in circumference, then editing has a 10km resolution (you can't force changes smaller than 10km). Basically, you get an altitude picture at the editing resolution. On top of that, FT generates fractal data that gets down to a few hundred meters (or less depending on some arcane settings). You can think of the altitude editing thing sort of like layers; there is a layer that you can paint on (initially blank) and there is another layer that gets added on (the fractal layer). The two layers have different resolutions and both are always there. The fractal layer gets dynamically computed, though, so it doesn't take up much in the way of memory, just computation.
You can rough in the world and FT can fill in some of the blanks. Contrast this with FT's image overlay system, which lets you put pictures that cover just parts of the world. The underlying terrain is still controlled by the fixed-resolution grid, though. I hope that made sense.
FT can output a whole lot of different things, including image files suitable for use with the GIMP and other such packages. There is also some not-quite-working SVG output that I hope to get working if I ever get back around to updating FT again.
I recommend that everyone buy a copy of FT and perhaps a few for their friends. I say that not just because I get royalties, but those royalties are a big part of why I say it.
http://www.fracterra.com/CGTutorial/ seems to be back up. I'm not sure what's going on at the ISP. It's what I get for paying too much just to host a few static web pages and not doing anything fancy, I suppose.
Ooh, that sounds more or less exactly what I was hoping for!
But does that mean I can't affect the altitude in regional maps on a smaller resolution than the global editing grid? In our example with the 10 km resolution, if I would gouge out rivers or quarries or something at a regional level, those changes would not be a part of the world, as far as FT is concerned?
Great with the tut, thanks!
(Also, yay royalties!)
FT has constant editing resolution across the whole world and local changes smaller than that resolution won't be preserved, yes. With the 64-bit version, you can increase the size of the editing grid, but it is still a constant resolution. I keep meaning to implement multi-resolution editing things (editing resolution proportional to the view area), but I have not yet been able to figure out a good way to force the edges to align between the grids and those finer-resolution local areas wouldn't play well with the river or flow computations.
I see. Thank you so much for your answers!
Is this a good place for questions about using the program, when I can't find the answers in the available tutorials?
This is as good a place as any to ask questions about the products. Sometimes I won't respond for a day or two, but I usually check in once a day or so.
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