I want to muck about with the Earth...

[Barefoot_Blacksmith]

I'm working on an alternate Earth that has higher sea levels, asteroid impact sites, and other assorted erosion and whatnot. I tried Fractal Terrains demo Fractal World Explorer, but it didn't really give me the level of control that I wanted. Should I take some GIS classes, or is there existing software out there that allows you to manipulate real-world data? Thanks.

Edit: Turns out what I had tried was Fractal World Explorer- Fractal Terrains may be exactly what I need. My question still stands: Is there any other software out there that could do this sort of thing, short of a full-on GIS suite?

[waldronate]

What sort of level of control are you looking for?

[Barefoot_Blacksmith]

Ideally, I'd like to be able to mess around with elevation, sea levels, and vegetation density, and render images from space level down to ~300 km areas or so. I'd also like it to make my coffee in the morning, if that's not to much to ask.

[waldronate]

FT should be able to do most of those for a high-level view. It's not terribly good at close-range things, but it wasn't intended to be. It's also not a renderer as such.

The coffee-maker module is still experimental at this point.