# Mapmaking Discussion & Philosophy (WIP/Critique) > Software Discussion >  Some fractal terrain questions

## Naima

Hello I will use this thread to post some questions on FT if someone can help me understand this tool better.
Lol solved all questions for now ...

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## Naima

Whats the maxand recomended size to import a map of earth or similar into fractal terrains?

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## waldronate

FT can work internally with an editing resolution of up to 8190 samples. It can alternatively work with an external binary file of up to about 1GB as the source of the terrain altitude (that's about 30000x15000 for a 16-bit data element). FT doesn't need to load the entire planet at once. It's possible to load a smaller area as a height field and just work with that (for example, a local GTOPO30 section or a USGS DEM). The biggest limitation is that FT is a 32-bit program and wants to keep everything mapped into memory. On a 64-bit OS, it should be able to get almost 4GB of workspace for everything (program code, housekeeping data, editing data, undo space, binary files mapped into memory, and so on); for a 32-bit OS version, everything would need to get crammed into 2GB of space. Back in 1999 when FT was being developed, 2GB was a huge amount of space; it's a bit less so these 15 years on...

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## Naima

I have 32 gb and OS 64 bit .

Not sure wich version I have installed? I just pressed exe from the file I got ... 


However I was skipping for whole day throguht countless world shapes , and I find a lot that I liked , but I didn't like some areas that didn't have a real matching "tectonic" idea ...not sure if is clear what Imean ... I mean the planet looked nice but mostly more like an alien planetary surface than anything that used to see tectonic clusterings.

Anyway I was wondering if I can cut and paste pieces of continents I like and paste into another generated one and procede so somehow by copy cutting pieces here and there ... 

also if there is a better way to have rugged surface countoruns , when I go in by 3x zoom on an area lets say as big as mediterranean , I can't get very precise hand editing and I get smooth coasts and not rugged ones or else ...

is there a way to increase to max resolution of the map so that I can edit in better? 

also is there  a system for smooth areas, or paint in a terrain area of a precise height? Lets say I want to make a whoe large plain of 1 m on sea level ?

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## Naima

Another question is 

I am trying to export the map I generated and in png file 16 bit 8192x proportional height but I always get error saving terrain etc ... ideas?

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## Naima

Yet another question is that somehow I am finding enormous difficulties to make the tools do what they should , for example the smooth doesn't smooth and instead rises huge blobs of terrain , the rough sometimes lowers some other times rises terrain but doesn't create proper roughtness ... 

so inthe regions I rised from sea I susually have a more blobby look how can I do to give the proper rough shape of rest of the territories as well as give the same contnental platform surrounding?

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## waldronate

> Yet another question is that somehow I am finding enormous difficulties to make the tools do what they should , for example the smooth doesn't smooth and instead rises huge blobs of terrain , the rough sometimes lowers some other times rises terrain but doesn't create proper roughtness ... 
> 
> so inthe regions I rised from sea I susually have a more blobby look how can I do to give the proper rough shape of rest of the territories as well as give the same contnental platform surrounding?


I'm guessing that you started from a flat world. A flat world is one where the roughness starts out at 0. Increasing the roughness simply reveals the underlying world. For a good intro to using FT, I really do recommend looking at Tutorial for Cartographers Guild to get some pointers.

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## waldronate

> Yet another question is that somehow I am finding enormous difficulties to make the tools do what they should , for example the smooth doesn't smooth and instead rises huge blobs of terrain , the rough sometimes lowers some other times rises terrain but doesn't create proper roughtness ... 
> 
> so inthe regions I rised from sea I susually have a more blobby look how can I do to give the proper rough shape of rest of the territories as well as give the same contnental platform surrounding?


If the export is failing, it's likely that you're running up against some of FT's limits. The full FT version can be found by holding down the Shift key when doing Help>>About. The /LARGEADDRESSAWARE link flag to allow 4GB for the 32-bit version was added around 3.0.12. Make sure that you've downloaded the most recent update from ProFantasy's web site.

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## Naima

I just downloaded yesterday it and there isonly one version the version Ihave here is 3.0.12.0  FT3

I tried already both tutorials , the one in wilbur and the basic one for make world but my issue is I Can't edit the heightmaps in Photoshop and get them back in ... 

also some tools do not seem to work well or perhaps not sure if I use them wirght because i can'tfind more tutorials apart the ones you already pointed me to and they do not help on do what I want to do .

For example if I get a world I am not satisfied with 100% and I want to add another continent I 'd like to save that map heightmap and then load a new generated world , pick a continent shape I like , export that heightmap ,  get both heioghtmaps in photoshop and combine as I want ... then rebring those into ft3 and apply some more effects ... 

Would be cool to have some erosive filters just like the ones in world machine or a mod macro creation .

Any ideas on how I can import export normal bmps heightmaps?and bringthem back innormally ? I have to pass all time by Wilbur?
Because that tool as well when I reexport seems corrupted when I reimport in FT3 as shows only a gray image .

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## Naima

Here are some of the issues I have talked above

the strange artefacts all overe the terrain that I can't get rid of throught smoothing offset or roughness and don't see other smooth options

then the strage smoothed areas I get when I rise and lower terrain instead of retaining some of the detail roughness base from the terrain it smooths creating those strange hardlines borders ... 

also Dunno how to get rid of those crest lines ridges , I tried even deterracing with no results, 

the rise roughness or smooth roughness buttons seems to not work , actually the second rises the mountains .

And here the strange circles of artefacts all over the map .



If  Iremove the Wilbur ridged multifractal those circles disappear , but the terrain completely changes , still is the function that I like ... is not possible to remove those circles in any way ?

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## waldronate

Try reducing the number of octaves in the Wilbur Ridged Multifractal parameters (the Parms button next to the function name). It's not well behaved above about 13 octaves; Id' say that you have about 15 octaves in your picture. The "RMF with Perlin's Improved Noise" is a function with the same general character of noise (different absolute shapes, but the same statistics - "RMF" = "Ridged Multifractal") but that will handle many more octaves of noise. Other numeric precision problems creep into the displays long before the noise starts to break down with the improved noise variant.

The smooth things are very strange. If you're using the prescale offset editing as recommended in the tutorial I suggested then you shouldn't be getting anything like that. It looks a lot like you're painting a large amount of smoothing onto the area.

As far as erosion things go, the incise flow tool in FT does something like that, but only at your editing resolution.

The version issue is a persistent one for me. I'm usually a few versions ahead of the version that's available at the ProFantasy web site.

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## Naima

First of all thankyou for your time helping me .



> Try reducing the number of octaves in the Wilbur Ridged Multifractal parameters (the Parms button next to the function name). It's not well behaved above about 13 octaves; Id' say that you have about 15 octaves in your picture.


I used 13 octaves, but after setting to 12 and it solved the issue . I noticed that if I leave at 13 and generate new worlds , I sometimes get the same issue and sometimes not ... something like a bug or something else?
I didn't notice from the top world large view the issue be4 untill when I went into a detail area to edit . though after when making attention I could see if the whole map had similar issue or not by the top view .




> The "RMF with Perlin's Improved Noise" is a function with the same general character of noise (different absolute shapes, but the same statistics - "RMF" = "Ridged Multifractal") but that will handle many more octaves of noise. Other numeric precision problems creep into the displays long before the noise starts to break down with the improved noise variant.


Not sure I understood that, but do you mean that RMF with perlin improved noise gives similar but better results than simple RMF?




> The smooth things are very strange. If you're using the prescale offset editing as recommended in the tutorial I suggested then you shouldn't be getting anything like that. It looks a lot like you're painting a large amount of smoothing onto the area.


I post here a picture to show better what is happening 


In this image the red arrows show the several editing I did . first of all I wanted to break the continent as was too huge for my taste and I lowered the land ... lower and rise seem to work but after some editing the land become to be rised smooth or lowered smooth ...

is there a way to lower and rise preserving or "recreating the roughness there ?

Is there a way to break a continent like by making also the continental platform around the coasts edited? As ypu see in the editing its just lowered land but no continental step .

The increase roughness and decrease roughness buttons to me do not work , they either create erratic results or dont work well , the lower one for example creates large bumps or mountains whatever the case .

Also whats The Value for ? When I select for example raise I can change the operation in the paintbrush options to lower or to value ... even if the button is rise, well rise and lower even on the same button work as written befoure but value seems to paint according to what he wants, I can't understand what it does well and how to use .
On some areas seems to paint on others nt and doesn't really works like a flattener on a specific value as I imagined 



> As far as erosion things go, the incise flow tool in FT does something like that, but only at your editing resolution.


Not sure how to use well as it gives a lot of interesting but also not really fine tuned results as I woud like , for example I would like ot control where and from where the river flow get incised in the map or to actually have a more natural erosion , without making rivers but also without lowering my mountains .




> The version issue is a persistent one for me. I'm usually a few versions ahead of the version that's available at the ProFantasy web site.


I do not understand this sentence .


Some questions about still how to Import export .

Is there a direct way to export a hieightmap out of FT , edit it in Photoshop and reimport in FT to continue work on it? 
( Possibly without the wilbur middleware as apart from beeing unconfortable and slowing workflow , it produces a mdr file that is all gray and not showing anymore all other details that were befoure in the FT 3.

Also some tools do not seem to work precisely as in the "Help" guide ... 

Here a test of the global set altitude value in a selected area ...



the settins are 500 feet but the results look pretty different than the ones showed in the help .


On the Saving issues :

if I save as special mdr at 8192 x4096 it saves fine seems 
If I save as wilbur mdr it says error saving whatever resolution  I pick .

When I go to wilbur and open the special it gives error unspecified at opening the file unknown code ( -100000)
so what I have to do to be able to open in wilbur? in the tutorial says special mdr but it doesn't work for me .
Also if the resolution might be the problem if I go down I loose most of the details and the work done on it .

On another test a straight from heightmap PS map into Wilbur then saved as mdr . When opened in FT3 it gets all sort of weird results from flat blue map to grayscale maps without any other info .

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## waldronate

A fractal function in the FT sense has two basic components: a noise function and a way to combine detail levels on the noise function to get the final result. Both "fractional Brownian motion" and "ridged multifractal" are ways to combine noise; the basic FT noise function (no type), "Wilbur", "Perlin's Improved Noise" and "Voronoi" are all examples of noise functions. That means that all of the "ridged multifractal" or "RMF" types will be broadly similar, as will the "fractional Brownian motion" or "fBm" types. The noise function groupings will share a character as well. The details are different among all of them. For general use, I do not recommend any noise function other than "Perlin's Improved Noise"; the basic FT and "Wilbur" types have serious implementation flaws that manifest in a number of ugly ways when zooming in. In short: prefer the fractal functions with "Perlin's Improved Noise" in the name for all new work; the other functions don't work as well.

FT has a feature which is underused (maybe because it's poorly implemented): prescale offset editing. Tutorial for Cartographers Guild is pretty clear to use prescale offset editing whenever possible. There are cases where it won't work, but for painting, it's what you should really be using. It allows for useful things like continental shelf breaks working correctly. Stick with Prescale Editing where you can. Seriously. It will solve a lot of your editing problems, even if you can't use some of the other tools as effectively with it enabled.

The versioning comment relates to the fact that I am the code monkey who scribbles out FT for ProFantasy. I have my current work version to test with and it's usually a few features and bug fixes ahead of the tested and released versions that ProFantasy makes available. What that means is that the behavior of my local copy of FT may be somewhat different than the ones that users in the field can get. It also means that I also have other versions such as the unreleased and experimental 64-bit version that has much higher limits on pretty much everything and will eat every byte of RAM on your machine (and them some). The documentation package also tends to lag a little behind the released feature set.

For exporting high-resolution data to Photoshop, consider using a raw binary file (File>>Save As, File type = Raw Binary File). If you Open the raw file in Photoshop as a 16-bit IBM Order file with width equal to the size you specified and height half that (e.g. if you save an 8192 file, you would read it as 8192x4096 16-bit IBM order in Photoshop), then you can do whatever you'd like to do. Because oceans are negative in FT, they will appear white in Photoshop. After you're done editing, save the RAW file and make a new world in FT from a binary file (for the above file, Per-Sample is 2 byte, LSB First, Signed; Line Width=8192*2=16384; Width=8192; Height=4096; Top=90, Left=-180, Right-180, Bottom=-90). All of your edits in Photoshop should come over.

When using the global set features, be sure to feather your selection a little before doing the fill. Failure to do so will result in fringes around the edges of the selection where the interpolation function overshoots.

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## Naima

Thankyou really very much indeed the prescale offset editing does a way better job than the other rise and lowe things I used, perhaps are different thing I dunno but if I pres the buttons on left then I get the issues but if I select all time by the tools rise prescale offset editing then they work much better and I am manually  painting the whole world now ....

Now the more I play with FT the more I am liking ... 

That said I was trying to follow the lost tutorial recovered now of Israh , and its extremely detailed ... really cool but ... I get stopped all times when I have to go back from Wilbur to Fractal terrain ,

What I do is save in special mdr, then open in wilbur, actually I didn't have to flip some other tiems though I remember I had to ... anyway I work on wilbur and save as mdr ... then this format file seems unendarstandeable by FT3 as seems it load either all black or all broken with noise stripes or all grayscale etc... I have set the Top=90, Left=-180, Right-180, Bottom=-90). but seems that they miss header and that info .

I will open a WIP on my world on the wip section in meanwhile so u can eventually see what I am doing  :Smile:  .... 


So are you the programmer behind FT? In case is possible to suggest lot of new features ? :=) ....

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## waldronate

I would recommend avoiding the MDR file format unless absolutely necessary because the data is flipped vertically between the two programs and FT doesn't like it if top is less than bottom. Interchange between Wilbur and FT used to work seamlessly and it was a convenient file format because it kept the maximum dynamic range of the data. However, when Wilbur was converted to OpenGL, a vertical flip happened in the data that caused minor between the programs. The raw binary format generates the same data as the special mdr but without the format problems.

Yes, I am the perpetrator of both Wilbur and FT.  Wilbur is a few years older than FT, but they (used to) share a good bit of code. Feel free to suggest features, but don't expect rapid response on releases. The current backlog of feature suggestions is about 14 pages single-spaced (in landscape mode, but that's still a lot of items). Some of the items date back to pre-release versions of FT in 1999; most are newer.

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## Naima

Ok ... well the first thing I woould fix, clarify or change are the rise lower tools , perhaps remove them and leave only prescale offset?  and about the roughness and smoothness they do not seem towork to me so I guess pehraps woudl need to be checked.

Now I have one another serious problem ... I have saved yesterday the file I was working on for most of the day lol .... as Mdr...
I also saved as Helium ftw just to be sure ... well I go to open today and Helium ftw is another different planet , and mdr when I open also gives another planet, so I did new binary and loaded the mdr , this time gived me the right planet but .... I can't edit anything even after putting custom 4056 and prescale offset enabled ... I pass over lands and seas with the rise tool and nothing happened , I increased even to 1 the value and nothing changes, its like is just not getting the changes ... why that I am doing something wrong? I have saved thewrong format and all my work is lost or what else?

I also tried to use the  FT to PS workflow , but when I reimport I still can't Edit the world with prescale offset tool ...  Any idea on how to reenable?


Still explored the whole internet in search of similar issues but I couln't find any . So I guess in theory it shoudl work , despite that I can't edit and use anymore on my maps the Prescale offset editing tools wich I rely upon for modifying things around . 

Also any idea on how shoudl I save to retake the world I was working b4 without loosing anything in order to reopen later to keep working on it?

Also what format shoudl I save from wilbur to reopen fine in FT3 ?

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## waldronate

Binary things are an all-or-nothing operation. When you work with a binary file, it can't be edited in the tools in FT. Having the regular offset tool work with binary worlds is on the to-do list. To date, people who have wanted to edit in something like Photoshop are on final approach to their end product and usually aren't too interested in continuing to work in FT. I would like to apologize as I did not realize that yours was a different situation.

The prescale editing tool can only work with fractal-based worlds.

I'm a bit troubled that the ftw file is giving you different results. Are you using it on a different machine?

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## Naima

So just to resume .

I am using it on an asus motherboard with Intel core i7 3930 cpu 3,20 ghz 32 gb ram and nvidia gtx 580 dual monitor .

Btw .

I cant get back to make it work so the 

How should I save the file to reopen it later and keep working in FT?How I put back to work the Prescale offset editing tools?How I have to save and reopen the file from wilbur to FT3 ? The one described in the tut doesn't seem to work for me .


Problem is that I have spent like a whole evening editing with the tools and then saved to retake the work on later , but that I can't do anymore now? Shoudld I complete the whole work on a world in one session as by the moment I close the FT I loose the ability to edit with the needed tools?
Os there a way to recover the work and keep using those tools?

Some extra questions 


Is there any kind of clone stamp tool in FT?How can I fix a terrain if I have for example a smoothed area and I want it to look as rough as surroundings?How can  Ido to fix height differences in a close proximity like an abrupt change in height up and down that cause a kind of spike?
[How can I do to flatten a whole area to a single height ? and then later on add roughness?

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## waldronate

The FTW format is FT's native format. If you save work in this format and it's not coming back in correctly, that is indicative of a major problem with the software. It was possible under obscure circumstances for FT to not warn you about saved work and exit without saving, but if you explicitly save the file before doing any exports then you shouldn't have any problems.

The prescale offset tools can only work on a world created with the fractal functions: it will not work on worlds created from binary data. The round-trip to external tools through binary exports means that the data imported back into FT can't be edited in FT.  I should probably make that clearer in the tutorial. If you're using the 16-bit raw binary file format then it should be possible to edit data in external tools like Photoshop or Wilbur and then import that data again into FT. The MDR file format has problems these days.

It's not nice of me to say this, but I view the first experience with new software in much the same way that I view crepes and children: the first one is for the dogs. Any work with new software is probably going to be done with assumptions that may not be appropriate for that software and that may result in much more difficult going further on. I definitely am disturbed that you're experiencing data loss, but it's possible that it may have been something as simple as an accidental lack of saving. I'm sorry to say this, but from what you've said at this point, you may be better off to use an image of your data as an image overlay and repaint the underlying terrain. If you open the FTW file that you saved and it's not the world that you saved then the data is gone.

A resolution-dependent workaround to get something like the original world data back into the system from a binary file is to:
  1) open the original FTW file
  2) create a new binary world using the saved binary file
  3) use Tools>>Actions>>Burn In To Surface to convert the current altitudes into the offset channel. The data will be rasterized at the current editing resolution.
  4) save the file with a different name than your original FTW file.

See the discussion about how altitudes work below.

I really recommend a few experiments without investing too much time in each. Do a little painting, save the file, exit, reload, and see if you're still getting the same results. It's possible that FT may have sprouted a problem that's sensitive to the number of cores: I've never tested it on a system with more than 4 cores.

FT doesn't have a clone stamp tool. The way FT operates doesn't really lend itself to that sort of operation. FT's Tools>>Global Set>>Altitude Value tool will set the current selection to the approximate value that you request. The adjustments are done in the offset channel, not the prescale offset channel, unfortunately. See http://www.cartographersguild.com/so...my-sanity.html for an example of what the flat areas might look like and a description of how FT computes altitudes. I'll repeat the basic altitude computation here:

altitude = (fractalfunction + prescale) * roughness + offset

There is a split [offset, scale, exponential, scale, offset] operation done after the basic calculation to get continental shelves. Note that the roughness channel controls the contributions of the fractal function and the prescale offset. Setting roughness to 0 worldwide gives a flat, featureless world. Setting it to 1 gets the basic standard fractal altitudes. If there's an area that's smooth, how to fix it will depend entirely on why the area is smooth. If the area is smooth because it's near the edge of a continental shelf, there's not much to do except paint in lots of roughness, but editing resolution will be very important here. If it's smooth for another reason and the roughness raise or lower painting tools aren't doing anything, then I'm not sure what's going on.

One of the important things to know about FT's editing tools are that the data is interpolated in a bicubic fashion to make lower-resolution editing data smoother. The exact function causes overshoots for a data sample on large, sudden changes, which appears as a ring around the edited area. The simplest way to deal with that it to use Tools>>Global Smooth on the appropriate editing channel.

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## Naima

Ok I did some testing .
if I keep my work always in the same file and not import export or else and save as ftw simple seems to work , so I can keep editing even after .
If I import a bmp as u said stops working.
SO I guess I have to keep work on ft3 and cant actually work on PS untill its finished completely in FT3 , perhaps its a future feature the one to allow editing againalso when bitmap?

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## waldronate

FT is intended as an exporter to other formats (the fundamental reason for its existence is to export maps for CC3). Work in FTW, export to something else for finishing is the general workflow.

On the list of things to do is to allow the editing elements to work with binary data.

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## Naima

Thanks. .
I think ft is more powerfull potential than a mere fractal terrain generator , the tools for up and down land in offset are incredibly precious to shape worlds as u like ....

Some features I might sugest  

A spline vector line that could split masses if land , allow movement and repositioning regenerating the seams in fractal mode 

A spline vector line to draw down cracks or tectonic dorsals .

Spline vector line to draw mountain ranges 

The above mentioned editing for imported maps

A better rotate world system when in orthographic visualization

An improvement on some actual tools not working as should like smooth or noise etc.

Other questions

Is it possible to select a region with the lazo and  edit inside a new random fractal generation ? For example if I like my wrld but not a certain area , can I select that region and regenerate fractal landscapes inside till I am satisfied with the results ?

I have tried also to apply some regional global settings inside a specific selection but the results are always strange , neglegible , exagerated or unexpected ... The most critical issues I am finding is the roughness not generating any or the border areas , a possible gaussuian border fading would be good but my changes always create sudden abrupt borders over those of the selection , so resulting in useless edits . Any way to mitigate the drastic changes at borders ?

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## waldronate

Thank you for taking the time to make suggestions.




> A spline vector line that could split masses if land , allow movement and repositioning regenerating the seams in fractal mode 
> 
> A spline vector line to draw down cracks or tectonic dorsals .
> 
> Spline vector line to draw mountain ranges


These are all good suggestions. Similar work items for editing have been on FT's list for a while, but not necessarily in the sense of replacing the first few octaves of the fractal function.




> A better rotate world system when in orthographic visualization


I'm not sure I understand this request. The pan tool has two modes: move the view center and move the center of projection (hold down the shift key - the hand will have a "C" on it). If the current projection is orthographic then moving the center of projection is equivalent to rotating the globe.




> An improvement on some actual tools not working as should like smooth or noise etc.


As I don't know how you expect them to work, I can't do anything with the request. Please describe your expectations instead of just "doesn't work how I want."




> Is it possible to select a region with the lazo and  edit inside a new random fractal generation ? For example if I like my wrld but not a certain area , can I select that region and regenerate fractal landscapes inside till I am satisfied with the results ?


Fractal settings apply to the whole world. I considered what the MojoWorld folks describe as "parameter bombs", but the general case is a bit unpleasant to implement, let alone describe how to use. It would require what amounts to a selection for each area to specify how to fade in the new data and a new fractal generation state for each area. Execution time will now go up proportional to the number of parameter bombs in place. And there would also need to be a place where users can access their list of parameter bombs. In short, a major amount of development and explanation time for a feature that would most likely get little use and likely require a lot of tech support. I'm not saying that it wouldn't be useful, just that I think that there are more valuable targets to use my (very) limited time on.




> I have tried also to apply some regional global settings inside a specific selection but the results are always strange , neglegible , exagerated or unexpected ... The most critical issues I am finding is the roughness not generating any or the border areas , a possible gaussuian border fading would be good but my changes always create sudden abrupt borders over those of the selection , so resulting in useless edits . Any way to mitigate the drastic changes at borders ?


The edges of selections can be modified using the Select>>Feather operation. This operation blurs the selection. When changes are applied through the selection, the edges will be smoothed, which will reduce the sharp transitions that you don't like. Using Tools>>Global Smooth on the channel that's causing problems will also smooth over the transitions.

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## Naima

> Thank you for taking the time to make suggestions.These are all good suggestions. Similar work items for editing have been on FT's list for a while, but not necessarily in the sense of replacing the first few octaves of the fractal function.



I might have a lot more if u interested , but depending on the time that you plan to invest in future development of FractalTerrains .
I believe that its an incredible tool that to me seems to have a huge potential that can be developed to whole new heights with a lot of new world building features on the same level of World machine but more focused on planetary mapping , from implementing even specific data and tools for planetary observation , details , geology , orography , tectonics , etc ...




> I'm not sure I understand this request. The pan tool has two modes: move the view center and move the center of projection (hold down the shift key - the hand will have a "C" on it). If the current projection is orthographic then moving the center of projection is equivalent to rotating the globe.


Sometimes when I drag the small globe on right it resets the position in previous one , or if I drag it out of the planet then it shifts again the positioning... I think that a way to drag the globe directly in the viewport when in the Globe orthographic mode woudl be better, just to be able to drag the world like on google earth .




> As I don't know how you expect them to work, I can't do anything with the request. Please describe your expectations instead of just "doesn't work how I want."


Yes because I am not sure yet how to describe, I have tried several tools with no success, perhaps the Help shoudl have some more precise samples on how to use those functions or they do not work as I expected . I can't formulate yet precise "expectations" and I will try to be more precise while I use more FT .





> Fractal settings apply to the whole world. I considered what the MojoWorld folks describe as "parameter bombs", but the general case is a bit unpleasant to implement, let alone describe how to use. It would require what amounts to a selection for each area to specify how to fade in the new data and a new fractal generation state for each area. Execution time will now go up proportional to the number of parameter bombs in place. And there would also need to be a place where users can access their list of parameter bombs. In short, a major amount of development and explanation time for a feature that would most likely get little use and likely require a lot of tech support. I'm not saying that it wouldn't be useful, just that I think that there are more valuable targets to use my (very) limited time on.


Not sure what Mojoworld folks say or man by parameter bombs ... but what I mean is more like .

Make a large selection , "feather" the borders ( as I read in your following explanation ) and apply a new Limited terrain generation that can blend itself with the surrounding out of the selection borders ... this to create a new continent , a small new random mass etc ....




> The edges of selections can be modified using the Select>>Feather operation. This operation blurs the selection. When changes are applied through the selection, the edges will be smoothed, which will reduce the sharp transitions that you don't like. Using Tools>>Global Smooth on the channel that's causing problems will also smooth over the transitions.


thanks I will try that , the feather numbers means that its one pixel or what?

Btw ... I was trying to manually paint a Oceanic dorsal on the map , as I am trying to manually paint the whole world directly in FT , the technique I used was make a large heavy thin drawed crack where I like with a decent deepness , then pass over with horizontal large and vertical tiny cursor rising the land again ... of course always offset prescale tools ... this way I created this, but I feel it coudl be much better perhaps by using tools or other ways that I am not yet aware of ... do u think is the right way to go or are there better solutions?


Attachment 65868


also is there a way to create patterns for the brush ? Like a diagonal brush or particularly shaped brushes?

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## waldronate

I definitely agree that FT has a great deal of potential. I'm always interested in feedback. The biggest problem with taking feedback, of course, is that I may not get around to implementing anything for quite a while. I'm currently working on about three other projects at the moment and FT is number 4. Plus, I'm about to have an infant in the house and that's going to mess with so many things (sleep and sanity, for instance)...

Hmmm... I don't normally use the little auxiliary globe at all, so I tend to forget about it. When I want to see a globe, I set the projection to Orthographic and use the pan tool. Spinning the orthographic display on the main part of the screen is just a matter of holding down the shift key while clicking and dragging.

MojoWorld is a procedural world generator and renderer from Pandromeda ( http://www.pandromeda.com/ - the site's not working for me at the moment, though). It offers the feature that you requested in the form of a "parameter bomb", an area of a world that's affected by another world's definition. The original version of MojoWorld limited the feature to circular areas on the surface; I haven't played with it since version 1.0 (actually a pre-release version), so I don't know if the definition was expanded or not. Your description and mine are of the same sort of feature, but allowing arbitrary shapes.

The units of the Global Smooth and Feather Selection operations are the same: sigmas. Not a terrible useful description, I know, but it's how the blur code that I originally used was defined. Figure very roughly 2 editing units per sigma.

Tools>>Actions>>Create Mound From Selection is a tool that will fill the currently-selected area of the offset channel with a shapeburst gradient from the minimum specified to the maximum. The "Gamma" parameter controls the non-linearity of the result. Draw a selection and try using a minimum of 0 and a maximum of -10000 with a gamma of 10. To gain experience with the tool, try it on a flat world with a moderately high editing resolution.

When you select one of the painting tools, there should be a "Paintbrush Options" toolbar that appears. On this toolbar is a button that is just marked "C". Click this button to get the "Edit Paintbrush Settings" dialog. Set "Form" to "Image" and then select a file in "Image Brush" to be used as your brush. The brightness of the image controls the height of the result (black=0, white="Value" on the "Paintbrush Options" toolbar.

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## Naima

Thankyou , I tried different settings on a flat surface for themount but the results are not really great , I do better with manual rise ... btw is there a way to calculate the % of emerse land and so of total dryland on the world in FT?

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## Naima

Anther question is when I save a bmp file It usually save the whole viewport comprised of the black surrounding parts of the image, is there a way to save Only the map and not also the contourns?

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## waldronate

FT doesn't have tools for calculating the current percentages based on the current world state, sorry, just for defining that during the initial world generation.

The only thing that I can suggest to get just the world data exported without any surrounding data is to zoom to the width of the world and check the "Keep Main Window Proportions" checkbox on the "Image Save Parameters" dialog. That's assuming that your projection is a squarish one. For rounded ones like Hammer, saving as a PNG will make the background areas transparent, if I recall correctly.

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## Naima

ok I mainly use the Equidistant projection to reapply it on other spherical sources orwork in PS , this when I will have finished with manual editing of the FT .
Starting to be liking the FT more and more though despite that I can't make work as I want 80 % of the tools , the ones really I use the most are prescale offsets  :Smile:  ... All rest unfortunately have too much unprecise , or uncontrollable effects ... Still hae to try rivers and erosions though and I think those will be cool too ... 

Btw I saw tht there are some math functions to be possible to use in FT . Is it possible to create Macros like in world machine or perhaps in a future? 

So that it could eventually be used to add andimplement local erosive functions .
Also when selecting , like dragging a rectangle from side to side of the world there are issues if I have moved the world viewport positioning , creating issues when trying to close the selection if you have the border in middle of screen .

Btw I tired that feather but what it does is seeming to enlarge the selection but not to "fade" or use a gaussian fading application , I am referring for example to the create mound action . I have applied that but to obtain a more distant from borders I have to play with gamma.

Also is there a way to paint easily on poles ? Its hard because itstretches the cursor and even if I simmetrize it with the dimensions its hard to paint right on the top center and it usually ends with a star looking kind of paint .

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## waldronate

Painting on the poles... FT's editing and selection tools are a bit of a problem area. The problem I'm talking about (which you mention in your suggestions) is that the tools and selections all take place in the space in which the editing data is defined, not in the space in which you're viewing the map. The definition projection for editing things (including brushes and selections) is the Equirectangular projection (it's technically the special case of Equirectangular called the Plate Caree projection). The edit things are defined as rectangular blocks of samples (rasters) that cover the whole world. What that means is that when viewing the equirectangular projection, brushes and selections will have exactly the shape that you expect; it also means that when viewing any other projection, there is distortion. What the raster part means is that there are 4 edges on the editing and the system has to determine how to handle those edges in addition to everything else that happens (processing at the top and bottom is different than that at the left and right).

What users expect (and what I didn't implement way back when) is for tools to work in screen space. That means that when you move the brush around, it should appear exactly as you would expect (a circle or whatever shape you defined) on the screen, but that its area should be projected from the screen space back to the world space to be applied. The problem isn't a math problem (play with the Paint Crater tool and watch its shape change as you move around in various projections); the problem is a performance and quality problem. FT is using software for rendering the image of the brush onto the editing surface; back when FT started, there weren't GPUs that handled float surfaces (and there are still huge number of low-end ones out there that don't). To reproject the brush raster to the editing raster is a very slow per-pixel operation. For example, projecting a 5x5 sample brush from a screen space of a 2000x1000 screen full-zoom Orthographic projection to a 6000x3000 editing raster is pretty ugly near the equator (nothing matches, but the shapes aren't too distorted), but painting over the pole means that the little 5x5 brush that you're painting with has to be stretched over the entire 6000 sample wide editing raster. Now imagine what happens when interrupted projections or composite views come into play: that brush projection has to be done for each projection component. Back when FT started, the P2-450 was the king of the processor heap: even it was far too slow for that sort of action. Processor are much faster now, but the processing is still expensive. Getting screen-space brushes working has been on FT's wish list for a very long time; implementing them will take a huge effort and may require significant rewrites of big chunks of the software.

That was a long-winded discussion of the problem of screen-space brushes. The selection tools have a similar issue, but in this case the big problem deals with wrap at the edges of the world in addition to the projection problems. FT tries very hard to keep things consistent. Maybe it tries too hard in the case of selections, because it wraps the selection back across "date line" (-180 to +180 world boundary = left to right raster boundary) in ways that make dealing with projections other than Equirectangular quite peculiar.

I suppose that I could take a few weeks to get those things working on a modern system and let the user decide what's too slow to use. The problem (as always) comes back to my development time. There's just not much of it.

FT has a rudimentary scripting language, but no facility for recording macros. I believe that the script language is discussed in the documentation, but it's pretty much along the lines of "select, raise, lower, fill basins, etc."

Feathering the selection is exactly the same operation as blurring the selection (a selection is quite literally implemented as an 8-bit grayscale image that dictates the opacity of applied operations). If you make a rectangular selection and feather it, the corners followed by the dashed lines will become rounded and anything applied through that selection will have smoothed edges. The algorithm that FT uses to calculate the dashed selection line is the same as many other packages: it follows the 50% opacity line in the selection.

I do agree that it would be nice to get tools like fill to work on the prescale editing channel. I know how, but the UI would be cluttered with elements specifying which set to add the data to. There is also an interaction between the roughness channel and the prescale channel that's just not there with the regular offset channel. Plus, there's that old developer time problem rearing its ugly head once again...

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## Naima

Yeh I u derstand , but notsure. For the feather ,  to make an example.

I select a perfect square , apply rise , I get a perfect rised square.

I select aperfect square , I apply feather 1 , the angles of the square become rounded , apply rise , I get a rounded square ...


But what I meant is that if I apply rise I should get a distance inside the borders something like a shape going toward the circle the more I rise the blurr wffect and thus not touching the borders of the selection , but in Ft , the borders are co sidered and if I apply for example a smoo over an irregular area with a square selection and a relative strong. Smooth , the results are a very visible cut on the rough area selected that is though smoothed , but the borders are very clear regardless of the feathering.

Also when I paint climates , Is there a way to paint more roughly and not perfect circles? Is also possible to insert new types of biomes? Like subtypes of deserts for example etc ... This not only in painting but in generation.

Also how those climates get generated? I see that in areas where I would expect deserts I get none , also considering that there are no rivers , adding em would change anything?

Do u plan to add some erosive filters to future releases ? Those of world machine would project ft really more into the future .

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## Naima

Another question ...

I was following the Israh tutorial ... unfortunately its not well specified the settings when he uses the incise flow because he uses a simplified coding like 8 1 4 5 etc ....

So since I read in his preface that he listed in the following order Blur Amount Flow and Blend I assumed that this shoudl be the sequence of his numbers and so I interpreted when putting  in the window for flow ... in this sample I am selecting all of the world , apply then the incise flow as he stated .... 

but on his world all goes fine in mine I get this weird result ... I did interpret wrongly his description or instead there is something else?

the border of my land here goes from 2000 m up I rised the sea as it was said in the tut etc ... here is a small passage quote ....




> FRACTAL TERRAINS: Part 1,
> Creating the Planet
> Important
> 
> Any number of erosional combinations can be used for almost endless possibilities.
> INTRODUCTION:
> 
> Fractal terrain's Incise Flow feature includes four settings; Blur, Amount, Flow Exponent and Effect Blend. You will probably be familiar with what each of these by the end of this tutorial but I will give a brief explanation in layman's terms.
> 
> ...



here the image

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## Naima

Also on the noise pattern , I used to generatet the whole world WM with perlin noise then edited all manually with the offset tools , but when I gocloser to down i see a lot of strange carvings in the surface that's not really looking natural , its there a way to "fix" those?



As u can see in the image on guide it looks different the terrain .

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## Naima

Another issue is that I am in no way beeing able to import decently a file from external tool into FT again , it always reads with errors the file both from Mdr in Wilbur and from Photoshop .

 :Frown:  I followed the exact same steps , I have the heightmap but it doesn't load right in FT .

I tried saving both as png heightmap i 16 bit from PS and Raw format , both can't be opened fine in FT , Wilbur opens the Png but when I save as mdr also can't be read fine by FT .

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## waldronate

> Yeh I u derstand , but notsure. For the feather ,  to make an example.
> 
> I select a perfect square , apply rise , I get a perfect rised square.
> 
> I select aperfect square , I apply feather 1 , the angles of the square become rounded , apply rise , I get a rounded square ...


This behavior is the correct behavior (well, it's how feather selection works in Photoshop and most other image editing tools that I've used). 



> But what I meant is that if I apply rise I should get a distance inside the borders something like a shape going toward the circle the more I rise the blurr wffect and thus not touching the borders of the selection , but in Ft , the borders are co sidered and if I apply for example a smoo over an irregular area with a square selection and a relative strong. Smooth , the results are a very visible cut on the rough area selected that is though smoothed , but the borders are very clear regardless of the feathering.


It sounds more like you want Select>>Modify>>Distance; this tool converts the selection into a distance from the edges of the current selection. 



> Also when I paint climates , Is there a way to paint more roughly and not perfect circles?


FT paints the precise brush shape with the current climate type. If you load an image brush, you can get any shape that you like.



> Is also possible to insert new types of biomes? Like subtypes of deserts for example etc ... This not only in painting but in generation.


No. The number of climate types for painting in FT is fixed. Note that some of these climate type such as mountains and hills will not be generated by FT. They are for painting the map used in the Simple Create tool. Please note that I do not recommend use of the simple create tool for what you're trying to do.



> Also how those climates get generated?


FT's climate data is computed from a yearly average of temperature and climate (unlike the Koppen classification, which also includes timing of rainfall and temperature). These average values act as lookup into a 2D table to determine climate type - http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/climateinfo.gif is the lookup table values. FT has the ability to generate a map with an arbitrary number of colors on that table: the image climate shader replaces the small number of values on the regular climate lookup table with an image. Each temperature:rainfall intersection on the table is colored according to the value read from the image. The Terraformer add-on that ProFantasy distributes uses the Image climate shader extensively. 



> I see that in areas where I would expect deserts I get none , also considering that there are no rivers , adding em would change anything?


FT defaults aren't the best. You typically need to add heat and/or reduce rainfall to get deserts. Again, FT's climate modeling is hardly worth the name. I always expected that people would paint what they really wanted.
Rivers in FT are derived from rainfall and have no impact at all on climate type. Similarly, there is no heat transport by air or water.



> Do u plan to add some erosive filters to future releases ? Those of world machine would project ft really more into the future .


FT has the Tools>>Actions>>Incise Flow tool, which is a form of erosion. Tutorial for Cartographers Guild discusses use of this tool in the context of building a world.

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## waldronate

> Another question ...
> 
> I was following the Israh tutorial ... unfortunately its not well specified the settings when he uses the incise flow because he uses a simplified coding like 8 1 4 5 etc ....
> 
> So since I read in his preface that he listed in the following order Blur Amount Flow and Blend I assumed that this shoudl be the sequence of his numbers and so I interpreted when putting  in the window for flow ... in this sample I am selecting all of the world , apply then the incise flow as he stated .... 
> 
> but on his world all goes fine in mine I get this weird result ... I did interpret wrongly his description or instead there is something else?
> 
> the border of my land here goes from 2000 m up I rised the sea as it was said in the tut etc ... here is a small passage quote ....


I expect that he intended the order of those values to be as in the previous version (blur, amount, exponent, blend). 8 is a huge blur radius; I expect that he used a much higher editing resolution than you have here. Please refer to Tutorial for Cartographers Guild for suggestions on how to use the Incise Flow and related tools.

Having an Amount of incise flow much more than 2 will basically destroy your world. Having a flow exponent below 0.2 or above 1 will likewise eat virtually all of the affected area. Having blend above 1 will also destroy things. Put them all together in excess and you'll get this weird bumpy thing like you showed in your screenshot.

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## Naima

thankyou ... about my latest question? I found this tutorial u posted a while ago . but the direct method u posted befoure doesn't work .





> First thing you'll need to do it so convert files into a straight uncompressed binary format. The simplest way to do this is to use Wilbur, as Greason Wolfe suggested. Open Wilbur, then use File>>Open and select your GIF. Use Surface>>Map Info and set the Top to 90, Left to -180, Right to 180, Bottom to -90. Now use Surface>>Rotate>>Flip Vertically to flip the world data vertically. Then use Filter>>Mathematical>>Span with a Low value of 0 and a High value of 11000 to rescale the terrain to approximately real values from its original 0..255 grayscale values. Finally, use File>>Save, select MDR Surface as the file type, enter a file name, and click Save. Click OK on the "Enter MDR File Save Parameters" dialog.  Exit Wilbur.
> 
> Now you will have an MDR file full of values ranging from 0 to 11000 meters and flipped vertically to compensate for a difference of opinion between Wilbur and FT regarding how data should be represented in the file. Using an MDR file and the extra work done in Wilbur will ensure that the data is described well enough that FT can easily ingest it.
> 
> Open FT, and use File>>New. On the Type page of the new world wizard, select Binary File and click Next. On the Binary Data page, click the Choose Elevation File button to bring up the Binary Data dialog. Now enter the name of the MDR file you saved from Wilbur (the ... button will let you pick it - you will need to change "Files of Type" on the Open dialog to "All Files"). Click OK on the Binary Data dialog, then click Next then click Finish. Your terrain data will appear in FT. The file you indicated above is relatively low resolution and only has 255 gray levels, which will make its reproduction in FT a bit low resolution.
> 
> See also http://www.google.com/#q=import+bina...Terrains&hl=en for more information on this topic.
> 
> If you intend to modify this data in FT I do recommend upping the world editing resolution using Map>>World Settings and setting a custom editing size of 2048 in the Editing tab. Follow this up with Tools>>Actions>>Burn Into Surface and then you'll have data in FT without any external dependencies.
> ...


But how about this?




> Also on the noise pattern , I used to generatet the whole world WM with perlin noise then edited all manually with the offset tools , but when I gocloser to down i see a lot of strange carvings in the surface that's not really looking natural , its there a way to "fix" those?
> 
> 
> 
> As u can see in the image on guide it looks different the terrain .


Also whats the maximum file size that WB and FT can handle? I tried to import a 20x10 k file in wb and worked but I can't save them out .

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## waldronate

You mention that the listed steps "don't work." Would you care to elaborate which step fails? Depending on the age of that tutorial, things may have changed in either Wilbur or FT or both.

As far as the visible squiggly bits go, it's because you don't have enough octaves of noise. You're starting to see the underlying fractal function poking through. If FT had been implemented properly then it would be dynamically adjusting the number of octaves as you zoom in and out to trade off execution speed for quality. However, it's a static number of octaves, so you need to adjust it until you see the squiggles go away.

FT's binary world is limited to source data with a maximum size of about 1GB on disk (that's a hard Windows limit on memory-mapped files in 32-bit). Regardless of the resolution of the binary data that's stored on disk, FT is still limited in what it can export.

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## Naima

The step that fails is the Import I did all exactly as u listed on the raw file saving format , I have edited then resaved in 16bit raw , opened the file imposing the correct numbers , the top 90 the left -180 , the lsb etc ... loaded up and then I get not correct map .

btw is there a way to paint in a single height level ? Like brushing 1 pixel wide for  a whole lenght and have it always put the land to -1 m for example? thinking of this to draw precise coast or  river flat .

Or is there a carving in that  I can use to create as loped path for rivers? I can toing this manually but its hard to make the find rivers find exactly the sloped trail  drawed .

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## waldronate

How is the map not correct? Is it completely garbled, stretched diagonally, or suffering some other failure? A screenshot of what you are getting (along with one you started from, ideally) would be helpful.

FT doesn't have goal-seeking for altitude or climate data. Those are things that are on the list to do, but haven't yet been implemented.

I'm not sure about what you are asking with your last question. Fun With Wilbur Volume 4 may be of interest. The precise program is different, but many of the concepts are the same.

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## Naima

I will test that soon again as I am in the process to go from wilbur back to FT .... but in meanwhile I have a question for Wilbur ....

I have nicely eroded my terrain and I got some very nice and evident big rivers , kind of amazon rivers ... carved into the land slopes ... but when I command to draw rivers those get completely ignored and insteadI get all sort of river that do not match the landscape ... why that? Is it possible to fix?

Also ...

I did load several texture for exmporting maps in wilbur , so I loaded flow map , I loaded grayscale , slope maps , sea mask etc ... saved all as png ... but the only output is always and only the heightmap ... what I have done wrong? Shoudl I save somehow differently?


Tough in FT instead seems to work much better and it finds them ....

btw I think the problem loading from Wilbur format to FT was because I kept both programs open at the same time loading a file from the other , perhaps this caused the issues, I noticed that when I switched of one of the two I coul dload fine . but the file from wilbur needed to be not only flipped vertically but also horizontally .

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## Thurlor

You need to fill the basins before drawing the rivers.

Wilbur can save two types of png.  One is a height-map the other is a colour image.

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## Naima

thankyou right , I was confused as in the tutorial said save as png but didn't specify that there was a difference between surface and texture .

Retested and anyway the rivers do not work in Wilbur .
But they do in FT ...

As for FT How can I save the River overlay image from FT to PS ? I did impose a whole black background altitude but not sure if thats the direct way to get it .


Back to FT I am paintng climates not diectly but using the temperatures and the wettness of the territory ... though the weird thing is that in higher latitudes the more I drop the temperature Instead of taiga, ice , tundras I get desert and savannahs ... any ideas why? 

I mean seems like I go tfrom hot climate desert to back to desert passing throught all the others ...


about painting temperatures, I put on the temperature map showing so all hot and cold regions of the planet , when I go to paint "Value" I set for example 18  I get a painting of a temperate green color if I paint in the equator zone but a cold bluette if I paint above the 30 parallel.

Why that? How can I do to get a more precise painting of the temperatures I want in particular areas? I tried with rise also but I got strange results that when rising a temperate zone it brought to hot then to cold if I kept pressing or viceversa

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## waldronate

The rivers do work in Wilbur, honest. It's where the code that FT uses came from! The precipiton erosion can, amusingly enough, leave a disconnected flow system. Filling basins after precipiton erosion will reconnect the flow system, allowing rivers to run their full length.

If you have saved the river overlay channel in FT, use the Image Overlays dialog to save the overlay. Otherwise, you'll need to make a black color scheme and save the image from FT's Save As menu item. A black color scheme can be achieved in many ways, including setting the altitude color ranges to black or setting the image climate shader to a pair of black images. 

FT's climate information is computed as a straight lookup into the temperature vs. rainfall table ( http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/climateinfo.gif ). The impact of latitude is purely on temperature (which has some impact on rainfall as well). FT will happily place jungles at the poles if that's what you request by modifying temperature and rainfall to where jungle happens on the chart. The climate chart shows that for rainfalls less than 12.5cm/yr and temperature above -7.5C, all climates are desert; for all temperatures below -7.5C, you get tundra. If you want something other than desert, trying increasing the rainfall. Note that FT has no notion of "hot desert" or "cold desert": there is merely desert.

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## Naima

Yes but for wilbur dunno I didn't change settigns, same landscape same filled basins on wilbur the rivers are all unconnected in FT instead flow nicely .

but for the temperature I get a big problem as .... I mean for the painting tool , as you can see in the image I painted a small portion of rise temperature on the poles and instead it lowered even more ... any way to fix that?

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## waldronate

FT always does an implicit fill basin before running rivers. It automatically does this step because FT's editing data is a different resolution than the river flow finding data.

There does indeed seem to be a major bug with the value specified on the Paintbrush Options toolbar for temperature (it looks like there may be an extra C-F conversion in there). Try setting the desired amount of raise or lower via the Edit Paintbrush Settings dialog instead of directly on the toolbar (click the "C" button on the Paintbrush Options toolbar and enter your desired amount in the "Current Brush:Value" edit control). This workaround seems to get the desired effect - that is, I can set things like a 0.5 degree temperature offset and it seems to work.

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## Naima

thankyou yes using the C worked  :Smile:  .. guess found something else to fix for next update ...  :Smile:  ...

Edit : After an initial enthusiasm I have to say that even with the c options things are not smooth , when I get a huge transitin effect when I paint kind of distorting the brush surroundings increasing or decreasing accordingly the painting creating so an almoust impossible to use too  :Frown:  ... 



I am starting to think that there are too many features not working properly though compared to the ones that do ...  :Frown:  .

as for the rivers well I did fill basin right befoure , I tried also to make it several times but no effect were like the ones of FT .

btw is there a way to import and apply a mask selection over a new fractal world in order to extrude out the continents and work on them ?

this to actually "redo" the basins of my actual workd taking only the shape of the seas, rebuild fictional temporrary ocena shelves and handpaint the rest inside FT then reexport and recompose that map with the land one .



bbtw 

how can I interpret the color image for alternate climate coloration ? I wanted to make one by my own and is there a limit in the texture resolution?
And why this kind of image overlay creates strange whirls and manding on closer view , but not the climate map normal colors? is it possible to create a map based directly on that last instead?
or perhaps export a map color scheme with flat surface to be used for work later in PS?

In particular also is it possible thropught C to impose a stable value to paint an area to ? like a global temperature of the area so to have as effect a translation of the relative climate without having ups and downs due to adding or removing ? I mean something like more paint only one level !

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## waldronate

> thankyou yes using the C worked  .. guess found something else to fix for next update ...  ...
> 
> as for the rivers well I did fill basin right befoure , I tried also to make it several times but no effect were like the ones of FT .
> 
> btw is there a way to import and apply a mask selection over a new fractal world in order to extrude out the continents and work on them ?
> 
> this to actually "redo" the basins of my actual workd taking only the shape of the seas, rebuild fictional temporrary ocena shelves and handpaint the rest inside FT then reexport and recompose that map with the land one .


Try Select>>Altitude Range with 0 as the minimum and a large number such as 1000000 as the maximum. This operation will select just the land at the current editing resolution. Then use Select>>Save Selection to save out that selection with a file name of your choice. Any time you want to restore that selection, use Select>>Load Selection and select the file that you saved previously.



> bbtw 
> 
> how can I interpret the color image for alternate climate coloration ? I wanted to make one by my own and is there a limit in the texture resolution?


For the Image Climate shader, provide an image of whatever resolution you like (if it gets too large, FT will crash). You should be able to load an image of at least 4096x4096 pixels.



> And why this kind of image overlay creates strange whirls and manding on closer view , but not the climate map normal colors? is it possible to create a map based directly on that last instead?


It's not an image overlay, it's a shader (an image overlay is a picture that gets drawn on top of the globe without regard to the underlying shading). Recall how the climate shader works: FT calculate the average annual rainfall and average annual temperature at a point. These inputs are used as indices into a 2D table to get a single climate type. That climate type is then used as a lookup into a 1D table of colors specified in the world settings. The Image Climate shader is a little simpler: it uses the average annual rainfall and average annual temperature as direct lookups into a 2D color table (the image that you load). The more pixels that you have in your image, the more possible little patches of color that you have.
FT also sports the Texture Color shader, which is much like the regular Climate shader in that the temperature and rainfall are used to look up a climate type. Instead of then using the climate type as a lookup into a 1D table of colors, the Texture Climate shader uses that climate type into a 1D table of textures, which are tiled uniformly across the output. So all areas with forest, for example, will get one texture; all with desert will get another, and so on.



> or perhaps export a map color scheme with flat surface to be used for work later in PS?


I don't understand this statement.

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## Naima

Ok  thanks , but about the climate painting? Is there a way perhaps to paint externally temperatures and wet level and obtain a similar climate result? Perhaps a small painting tool in quch to project a lookuptable as the one i ft seems not going well?

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## waldronate

> Ok  thanks , but about the climate painting? Is there a way perhaps to paint externally temperatures and wet level and obtain a similar climate result?


There isn't a way to import maps other than altitude maps, sorry.




> Perhaps a small painting tool in quch to project a lookuptable as the one i ft seems not going well?


If I understand this request, what you would like is a painting tool that will adjust the local area's temperature and rainfall so that the climate moves toward the nearest climate of the selected type. For example, if you paint "forest" into an area of "tundra", the system will adjust the rainfall and temperature to the nearest point on the climate lookup table that is "forest". Unfortunately, this change will leave a ring of other climate types around the edges of the brush. I've implemented this before (in a very slow fashion), you see, and I really didn't like the bullseye climate effects.

One thing to try with the temperature is to use a value on the edit dialog of about 0.1. The temperature is raised by that amount every time the cursor moves a pixel, so they all add up quickly.

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## Naima

Ok but you got the issue , I am not able to avoid the bull's eye effect created everytime I paint in the temperatures , I am using the C , I press it enables then change to 0.1 the value , set to add or subtract ( can't find a function that says replace like umposing only a flat temperature ) then I click ok and I start painting but after I paint sometimes works on the borders of a temperature but others create thin stripes of temperature around a cyclonstyle eye , can't cntrol it effectively without having to change in and out all time the c ( pressing a second time disables it ) .
Wonderint then is it possible to paint in a similar fashion ( like a moving brush that increases progressively the contourns colors along a lookup table ) outside FT perhaps in Photoshop?

I am really trying to make the painting of temperature and wettness work but to no extent , also what actually influences the climates? Not only temperatures and wettness? Because I see that sometimes a climate biome jumps not to the next but to another , when I expect in a temperate latitude to paint a lower temperature I shouln't get tropical bush but temperate forest , increasing temperature leads to desert and savannah .


Is there a way tp paint those in similar but working fashion in photoshop perhaps?

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## waldronate

The bullseye is most likely happening because you're using a round brush with a conical pattern. Try making a noisy-edged brush in Photoshop and see if that helps. The painting tools in FT are fairly primitive, though. Note that painting with a "value" brush will set the editing values to exactly what you'd like. If you want to eliminate the fractal offsets for temperature, go to the World Settings property sheet, temperature page, click "Specify Base Temperature" and set Random and Variance to 0. The only contributions will then be from the Base value on that property page and the loss in temperature due to altitude. There are similar controls on the Rainfall tab (the only effects will be reduced rainfall from the temperature drop).

Note that you do have the option to get a roughly constant amount of temperature and rainfall in an area by selecting the area and using Tools>>Global Set>>Temperature Value or Tools>>Global Set>>Rainfall Value. These features adjust the temperature or rainfall editing channels in the selection to get to the desired temperature. Remember to feather your selection before running these operations to get smooth transitions.

The only inputs to selecting the climate are temperature and rainfall. rainfall is dependent on temperature to some extent. I should probably add a "let me paint in exactly what I want" option some day.

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## Naima

Hi I was trying to add fractal noise in wilbur over a specific region , but no mattter what I change the numbers to I always get a Flat LArge empty hole in the terrain , any ideas on how to fine tune that? I want it simply to add small fractal multiridged new noise on the land .

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## waldronate

Try setting the operation to "Add" instead of "Replace".

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## Naima

thanks can u tell me how  can do to rise and make higher a certain mountain range? I have a set of mountans and I would like to make them higher but not destroy the surrounding terrain , I tried selecting and use span , 1000 to 2000 but it changed the whole world regardless of the selection .

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## waldronate

drawing a selection around your area of interest and use Filter>>Fill>>Mound with an Operation of Add.

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## Naima

thanks ....

Here I got another weird problem , I decided to first increase the height range in FT and then export so instead than a -11000 to 11000 terrain I set up the height range in the parameters of the FT world to -11000 to 22000 to have then a higher range in wilbur ....

Then I imported in wilbur and I did a couple of erosions under the sea but I couln't appreciate anything special , so I did a Basin fill on all world with generic settings of -1 and I got this weird result ... 
why that?

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## waldronate

Interesting. It looks suspiciously like you've hit an internal limit on the basin fill operation. I would hazard a guess that your surface is very large. In an ideal world, that sort of thing would be a configuration option.

If the world isn't particularly large, try saving the MDR in Wilbur, exiting Wilbur, and loading the MDR again (Wilbur should have no problems handling its own MDR files). Then see if you get the same result. It's possible that there might be some internal memory layout things that are causing problems.

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## Naima

Its 16384x8192 

I have saved as mdr file , closed and reloaded, then I have selected all and applied the fill basins and I get the same results  :Frown:  ... Any other solutions?

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## waldronate

I would describe that as a large surface. I upped the limit for the 1.82 x64 version of Wilbur; see if that helps.

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## Naima

How? 

A new download? I havethe latestversion ...

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## su_liam

It's available for download.
I'm skipping it, 'cause my Windows experience is strictly 32-bit...

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## Naima

But Just added As I have the latest version ,and on the site I do not read of a new one ... The one I have says in the help 1.81.00 
where is the 1.82 ?

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## waldronate

Try refreshing the browser page. The current version is 1.82. I put it there myself, just this morning...

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## Naima

Ok I downloaded the x64 latest one and it says is 8.2 but the problem is still there the fill basin don't work as expected ... other ideas ?  :Frown:  ...

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## Naima

I have tried to go back in the 8192 pixels image , but I get similar weird results ... might them be to the height differences? and how can I do to not loose all the nice carved details I got there?

I need to fill to make the fluvial erosions etc ....

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## waldronate

It turns out that 16384*8192*20 is less than zero. If you're doing signed 32-bit math, that is. The 1.83 x64 version of Wilbur should have learned math a little better for those really large surfaces.

With regards to that 8192 pixel image, those all look to be legitimate basins that Wilbur filled in. Fill basins always fills basins - you can't get an endorheic basin with Wilbur. The best that you can do is to manually cut those basin rims to establish flows.

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## Naima

but those are huge surfaces , and for some reason it doesn't look them to be basins but large surfaces of areas, how can I do to not cover so big surfaces but only small basins?for example the one on left covers several valleys , river areas, and basins , for a deep height that goes from 300 m up to 2000 and covers the whole territory rather than only small holes, the whole world becomes mostly broken in large flat areas , I cant go in each one of them manually and fill , also that is not happenig on Fractal terrain but also bring it in and out of FT to wilbur is not a viable option , so how to actually avoid that without a manual intervention and make it much smaller basin filling?

For better viewing I used fill basins with water in FT ... wo why instead in wilbur I get abnormal flat areas?



so it shows its an issue in wilbur , also I have tried to make a selection of all basins but it always ends in a no selection .

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## waldronate

What you showed in that large post is actually an artifact in FT, not Wilbur - FT is filling the basins in the offset channel to exactly the same sort of flat areas that Wilbur does. However, FT modulates those areas with the fractal function as part of its normal operation.

Note that the basin fill operation doesn't care how large your basin is. If I draw a 1-pixel rim around a flat map and fill basins, then the entire map except that rim will be filled because the entire map (except the rim) is a basin. The algorithm has no notion of the size of a sample (or the shape of one, for that matter): if a sample is surrounded by a higher set of samples, it's going to get filled, even if that higher set is far away in terms of the number of pixels.

As far as selecting basins showing no selection goes: The Select>>From Terrain>>Basins feature in Wilbur does a fill basins on a temporary surface and then marks as selected any places where the temporary data is higher than the main surface data. If you try to select the basins after you have filled the basins, you will find that there is no selection because there are no basins (you have already filled them, so they no longer exist). Selecting basins before filling basins will get the areas that would be filled by fill basins.

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## Naima

Ok I am confused .
How can I do to not get those large areas filled ? Isn't there a maximum height level for deepness of a filled basin?

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## waldronate

Basin Fill fills basins, regardless of depth. The parameter that you enter controls the slope at which the basins are filled (-1 means that Wilbur computes an appropriate slope for the image resolution). The edge of a basin is either sea level or the area that would be full of goo if the world is flooded by a viscous goo (the parameter you enter on basin fill is approximately equal to the viscosity of the good - a value of 0 means that you'll get flat-filled basins; a value of -1 means that you'll get slightly-sloping fills on the basins that allow for rivers to be correctly routed across the basin). Fun with Wilbur, Volume 5 shows how flow across basins filled with -1 look.

The way that you keep basins from getting filled is to make them not basins. Cut a small channel at the edge of the basin to let the water out.

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## Naima

I am trying to use the brush to cut in but despite I tried all values between -1 and 0.0001 it alwys carves the same depth .
I am missing something there ? I can't get those brush to work seamlessy ...

also tried the fractal add on to add more noise , I noticed there are scale functions but also there regardless of the several tests I didn't get any appreciable result and the info on the manual didn't  help me understand how t apply the fractal ... 
for example in place of adding generic noise of 10 % I wanted to add more bigger clusters of fractal terrain , but didn't work .

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## waldronate

Using the paintbrush, the value you paint in Wilbur is the altitude you get. If the lowest depth of your basin is 100, setting your brush to 100 and operation to Lerp (linear interpolate) will put the value 100 under the brush wherever you paint.

The default range of values for the ridged multifractal noise function is 0 to 1 with a very approximately Gaussian distribution (I base this on starting a new surface, doing Filter>>Noise>>Fractal Noise, accepting the default settings, and then using Window>>Histogram to look at the distribution - kind of a 2-hump thingy, but very approximately Gaussian). On the Fractal Noise dialog, "Amplitude" is the amount to scale the result by. Entering 1000 for Amplitude and setting Operation to Add will get fractal noise values from 0 to 1000 added to the existing altitudes in your selection.

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## Naima

but the size of those "fractal bumps" are regulated by what?   Sorry I cna't understand the specific entries in that window, like the intensity , size, tiling , dimensions add, remove etc ... Is there a precise description of what it does with the results = I woudl like ot use that to Break the River flowing straight, but I mean the LArge Amazon rio like rivers , not the smaller ones, those I can break eventually with the normal % noise .

about the brush if i want to paint and link for example two river basins, one upper map and the one down map , but in middle there is a small hil and I want to make the river pass throught that so I used the brush , but that cutted the hill in two , and then going down it rised a ramp to the other river , that is more down in valley compared to the upper one , so to link better them by hand how should I procede in wilbur? 

thanks for ur huge patience with my questioning btw ...

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## waldronate

On the Fractal Noise dialog, there are two columns of values: The left column (H, Lacunarity, Octaves, Offset, fgain) are the fractal parameters. The only thing you'll normally need to change is the number of octaves. This being Wilbur, try to keep that value below 12. The right-hand column is a little more useful. Amplitude describes how much the fractal should be scaled. XY Scale describes how large of a plane to evaluate. The default value of 2,2 gives features of a specific size. Increasing this value will give more closely-packed apparent features (4,4 will show an area twice as large in X and Y as 2,2 for example). XY Origin describes where to start evaluating the noise on the surface. If you change these value a little, you are effectively panning though the surface. The final parmeter on the right, Displacement, is where on the Z axis the XY plane is evaluated. Changing this value repeatedly by just a little (say 0.1) without changing anything else will effectively provide a set of maps that "evolve" over time. As an aside, Window>>Journey Through Texture Space provides a way to create a set of maps that differ by an amount specified. At one point, the slider worked, but it seems that I broke it along the way again.

You can use the brush tool in Wilbur to raise or lower instead of setting the value to a specific height. The tools below the paintbrush on the tools palette are lower and raise, respectively. Using a value of 0.01 (entered on the paintbrush toolbar accessed via View>>Toolbars and Docking Windows>>Paintbrush Options) and a largish brush size. These tools may seem similar to the ones in Fractal Terrains. Both programs use pretty much the same code for these features (Wilbur had them first, if I recall correctly).

Finding a user willing to ask questions is very helpful. Feel free to ask more. If some of my answers seem a little short, it's likely because I have distractions in the immediate vicinity.

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## Naima

Previews doesnt work either, and woudl be usefull ... I am trying to understand that fractal nose but I applied leaving all as normal on a selection height from -500 to 5000 m with all default apart octaves set to 8 and xysclae to 1 , as if I understood increasing it woudl show more packed noise ? 

I didn't understand then what means the origin thing anyway .

as for slider I do not see any and no z option ... 

I have latest wilbur version 

but I can't see good results here ...

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## waldronate

The slider was on the "Journey Through Texture Space" window.

To help with the noise visualization, imagine a large parking lot (or other fairly large paved surface). The texture on the surface of the parking lot (be it gravel, cobbles, macadam, or other such) represents your noise function. Now imagine that you're going to take a picture of the surface. If you take a picture of a 10cmx10cm area, the texture of the parking lot will be pretty prominent. If you take a picture of a 1mx1m area, the texture will be less prominent, an so on. The size of the area that you photograph is equivalent to the XY Scale part on the fractal noise dialog (thus, as the scale gets bigger, the features get smaller). Where on the parking lot that you take your picture is equivalent to the XY Origin. The analogy breaks down when the notion of Displacement is introduced: it would be equivalent to a 4D parking lot that gets rotated in; we'll stop there. The implementation in Wilbur is simpler: all noises in Wilbur are defined as 3D blocks of values; it is similar to a cloud with its varying intensities. What Wilbur does is to extract a single plane in X and Y at a given Z value (the Displacement value) and use the intensity at each point as a height value.

If I understand correctly, you're interested in adding noise to the low-lying areas of the world. For some reason, the "Fractal Noise" tool isn't adding the results in correctly. Time to fall back on an older tool: Filter>>Calculate Height Field. This tool is the general computation dashboard of which the Fractal Noise, Spherical Fractal Noise, and Calculate Function tools are special cases. On the Height Field Computation dialog, turn off the "Spherical Evaluation" checkbox unless you want full-world spherically-corrected noise to be added. Set Operation to Add. Set Position to the XYZ origin that you want and Size to the XY scale that you want (Z scale doesn't do anything; you can ignore it). Click the Scaling button to bring up the Surface Scaling dialog, select Single Value, enter how much noise you want added and then click OK to dismiss the Surface Scaling dialog. Click OK to dismiss the Height Field Computation dialog and add the noise to your surface. For best results, be sure to feather any selection to avoid hard edges on the values.

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## Naima

Is it possible that there might be memory leaks on Wilbur ? I have 32 gb ram , I have launched a erosion flow on a 16384 x 8192 map and it popped up a message to close other programs couse memory was missing .

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## waldronate

It is quite possible that there are memory leaks in Wilbur.

Each pixel on the map takes up 9 bytes of memory (4 bytes for height, 4 bytes for color, and 1 bytes for selection) and each pixel in each undo level takes up 8 bytes of memory (4 bytes of height and 4 bytes of color). You're looking at about 1GB per operation, not counting any temporaries (the basin fill uses several and from different memory pools) or overhead in the system. The default is 8 undo levels, so you can easily be running up against the limits of your system after several operations.

Try using Edit>>Preferences to set the number of undo levels down to 2 and see if that makes any difference in memory usage.

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## Naima

Ok thanks , btw I doscovered why earlier some of my mdr opening were not working .
I can't open them when I have both instances of Wilbur and Fractal terrain contemporarly trying to open the same file or one have it loaded already .

I have mixed in the workflow also world machine ^^ ... but I guess I can't ask you things on that tool also hehe .... I am trying to find a way to not erode under the sea level though wich is not actually one big problem to overcome ...

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## waldronate

A binary world in FT keeps the file open for as long as the file is open. This behavior (and the 1GB limit) is a result of mapping the whole file into memory at once.

To keep erosion from going below sea level in Wilbur, select everything above water. Fluvial erosion stops at the edge of the selection.

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## Naima

Here you can see what I mean .

When I eroded the surface outside I used a flat sea to not make the erosion go too down sea level and then I imported in PS , I repasted the land over the sea part , I noticed that the borders were similar so I merged and saved as new heightmap for wilbur, then I reimported and relowered theland to sea level , well the original one ... but this is the result , some areas look to have been under eroded under sea level even if by few as I couln't notice the difference in gray shading in PS .

how can I do to fix that and restore the coastlines? I tought of a mask import in wilbur to select only sea orland? but then I mgight still get weird results ...

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## waldronate

Load (and make, if needed) a mask for the original coastlines, load that as a selection in Wilbur, and then use height clip with a minimum of about 0.01 and a maximum of 1000000.

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## Naima

what effect does this do?

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## waldronate

It sets anything in the selection below 0.1 to 0.1 and anything in the selection above 1000000 to 1000000. In short, it restores the land specified by your mask.

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## Naima

I should apply this to land or to sea or to both?

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## waldronate

You would select an area that represents your desired land area. Height clip with the above parameters will ensure that the selected area is land, whether it started as land or as sea. The 0.1 minimum is a convenient value that's greater than zero but still very low and the 1000000 is a large value that's likely to be above all of your existing land and so won't affect the highlands.

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## Naima

Yes that worked but how I do to instead sink the outside ? I shoudl invert the selection and put minimum -1000000 and max -0.1?
mmm tried that but didn't work :p ...

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## waldronate

Using a selection with height clip at 0.1 to 1000000 followed by invert selection and height clip with min -1000000, max -0.1 should have made everything outside of your original section ocean and everything inside your original selection land. If you have feathered your selection, the edges may be a bit funny. Consider using Select>>Modify>>Binarize with a value of 127 at the start of the above process to ensure that your selection has no feathering before you do the first height clip.

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## Naima

Ok thanks I did that actually but for some reason , perhaps I missed something but , I got a flat ocean .

Here in meanwhile another small issue ...



why the lines do not close?

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## waldronate

If you got a flat ocean, you probably didn't have a selection for just the land area or you forgot to change the values on min and max.

The gridlines thing is a new one to me. Try turning off "Adaptive Grid Resolution" and moving the "Subdivision Level" slider to 32.

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## Naima

All of a sudden Wilbur is not working anymore, whenever I launch the application it says Wilbur executable stopped working , I tried redownload and repair, and same result, so I uninstalled and reinstalled same result .. .what can  I do to make it work again ? 
here the details of issue :

Nome evento problema:	APPCRASH
  Nome applicazione:	Wilburx64.exe
  Versione applicazione:	1.83.0.0
  Timestamp applicazione:	53d722a1
  Nome modulo con errori:	Wilburx64.exe
  Versione modulo con errori:	1.83.0.0
  Timestamp modulo con errori:	53d722a1
  Codice eccezione:	c0000005
  Offset eccezione:	0000000000047b90
  Versione SO:	6.1.7601.2.1.0.256.1
  ID impostazioni locali:	1040
  Informazioni aggiuntive 1:	6cfc
  Ulteriori informazioni 2:	6cfc18d41fdee59202d81425c116c832
  Ulteriori informazioni 3:	2e4c
  Ulteriori informazioni 4:	2e4c45bb94334b28f8ac415188937dfc


I didn't do anything special last time I coudl use I saved and quitted program and pc . then later reopened and doesnt launch .

desperate  :Crying or Very sad:   :Crying or Very sad:   :Crying or Very sad:

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## Naima

tried redownloading c++ 2010 executable , and nothing changed still crash at launch as aboove... I see actually no reasonwhy it shouln't work , it worked for whole day and after the pause Ididnt d oanything speciall to it  :Frown:  ....

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## Naima

I really dunno what's going on , its several hours I am trying to fix the problem , I tired to launch pc from safe mod and the tool doesn't work , same problem .
I uninstalled, switched off reinstalled switched off launched, same problem , I tried redownloading all latest c++ redistributable , no solution .
I tried all but nothing is working , I always get a appcrash and  " wilbur64 stopped working  message " ... I am freaking out now I really hope you can help me get it to work again  :Frown:  .....

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## waldronate

Take a deep breath. Relax.

The most likely cause of the problem is a corrupted registry setting for Wilbur. 

Before you start, backing up your registry is a good idea (there are many good tutorials for this on the Web).

Open REGEDIT.EXE so that you can remove the Wilbur registry keys. Navigate to "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Slayton Software" in REGEDIT. Delete the Wilbur section. Exit Regedit.

Wilbur should start correctly.

Note that if you want, you can delete the whole Slayton Software section, but that will also eat your active FT settings (not any worlds or definition files, just things like screen placement).

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## Naima

Hahhaha .... Dance of Joy  :Very Happy:   :Very Happy:   :Very Happy: 
I did indeed open the registry files looking for wilbur but I couln't find ^^ ... thanks now works yeah :p ....

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## Naima

Btw , when I did the height clip , I have some coastal borders that are fine and at the sea level , but others are like 100 - 200 m on the sea  level , is there any trick to bring most of those more hight shores at the same level of the others without destroying the coastline?

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## waldronate

Try:
Select>>From Terrain>>Height Range with minimum = 0 and maximum = 10000000 to select the land.
Select>>Modify>>Border with a range that you'd like (15 or so is likely a good starting point)
Filter>>Fill>>Mound with minimum of 1.0, maximum of 0.2, and operation of Multiply.

This set of operations should scale the areas directly along the coastline by 0.2, increasing to the edge of the selection, where it scales by 1.0 (that is, no effect). This technique will (should) bring areas right along 0 altitude (the coast) down to 0.2 times their previous value while leaving those more than a few samples away from the coast unaffected.

A similar result can be obtained by:

Select>>From Terrain>>Height Range with minimum = 0 and maximum = 10000000 to select the land.
Select>>Modify>>Border with a range that you'd like (15 or so is likely a good starting point)
Select>>Feather with a value that you'd like for smoothing (2 or 3 is a good value).
Filter>>Fill>>Set Value with a value of 0.2 and an operation of multiply.

This result is somewhat different because the topology of the coastline will affect the result because the result of the feather operation is dependent on how many pixels are in the local area and that result controls how strongly the multiply by 0.2 is applied.

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## Naima

Ok I will try that ant tell you the ouctome ... 

I can't stop notice though that a lot of tools and erosion are in wilbur but not in fractal , why that ? Why not just bring all tools in FT too and also why I can easily save maps in right size while in FT i have to cut and then enlarge the map couse it not saves the actual told dimensions but the window taking also the empty areas .

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## Naima

Also a very usefull thing woulkd be the possibility to pan around even when having open a window like for the incise flow function , so that while watching the preview ,  in other parts of the world , a lot of time I had to scrap what was done and go back because what looked good in a zone didn't in another , and I was in a zoomed in because from max zoom out is not possible to see details .

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## Naima

could you also give me the description of the erosion precipitation window entries? 
I can't find it in the manual .

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## waldronate

If I recall correctly, the Precipiton feature is newer than the manual. The general idea of the feature that that the system drops agents on the surface, which move downhill in the direction of steepest descent to a low point, moving some amount of elevation difference between cells as they do so. The total number of agents per pass is equal to the number of samples on the surface and each agent is dropped at a random location to start. Dropping them randomly prevents a certain class of artifacts that happened with an earlier implementation, but it doesn't guarantee that every point on the surface will be eroded equally.

At every step in an agent's life, it looks at the surrounding cells. How many cells it looks at is determined by connectivity: 4 (the four cardinal directions: up/down, left/right) or 8 (the four cardinal directions plus four diagonals). Of those surrounding cells, it finds the lowest one and adds Delta * (difference in height between current cell and lowest neighbor) to the lower cell. It then moves to the lower cell and repeats the process. This process repeats until the agent is in a pit surrounded by higher cells, until the agent runs off the map, or until it hits its maximum allowed number of steps. How the agent determines the edge of the map is controlled by the Wrap item: "None" means moving over any edge is off the map, "X Only" means that moving off the edge in the horizontal direction wraps around to the other side, "Y only" means that moving off the edge in the vertical direction wraps around to the other side, and finally "Both X and Y" wraps both horizontal and vertical directions. How many steps the agent can take is determined by the Max Length item: a value less than zero means that the system should pick a maximum number of steps, while values greater than zero will only let the agent move that number of steps.

That covers the Basics of the Erosion (Precipiton) Setup dialog. The Multi-Pass section is all about laziness. I became tired of repeatedly opening the dialog to get my desired final effect and I added the Passes feature, which repeats the above process the number of times specified. I'm not sure when the last time that I use the Blend or Noise features; they control the amount of blending between the uneroded and eroded surface for each step and the magnitude of noise to sprinkle on the surface at each step, respectively. If I ever get scripting working, this section will probably become a link to a parameterized script.

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## Naima

Thanks , here another small problem , I applied the heightfield computation noise in a selection with a feather of 2 ... 
but it affecs also the outside ...

The changed values are :

size x y z 222 for all and no spherical evaluation , operation type set to multiply and size to 150 



about the above description of the erosion , I am not sure I understood the meaning of :

how to make it more deep carving?

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## waldronate

> I can't stop notice though that a lot of tools and erosion are in wilbur but not in fractal, why that ? Why not just bring all tools in FT too


There are a lot of features in FT that aren't in Wilbur, too (multiple image overlays, dynamic fractalization, and so on). It's partly product differentiation and partly that there are some things that work well enough for a static-resolution system, but translate very poorly into a dynamically-generated one. For example, the precipiton erosion feature: in Wilbur, the user can see exactly what they're going to get; in FT, the parts that can get eroded are only a small part of the final display. There's also a big fugly hiding in FT that most people don't notice right away, but that colors everything: editing data is defined in the Equirectangular projection, but most of the algorithms assume a flat equal-area map. Things in FT (rivers, erosion, editing, and so on) pucker strangely near the poles because much of the code came straight from Wilbur and Wilbur doesn't know or care about spheres. If I were starting out to write FT today I would implement things MUCH differently (not least because hardware is so much more powerful now thanit was back in 1997 when the FT ball started rolling). However, I'm a little stuck between adding new features and allowing people to keep their existing worlds. I try not to add features that highlight the ugliness of FT's spherical handling. If I ever get a few months where I can work on code (highly unlikely until the new baby is mostly grown), then I might work on fixing things. I'd probably sleep, though, so no promises.




> and also why I can easily save maps in right size while in FT i have to cut and then enlarge the map couse it not saves the actual told dimensions but the window taking also the empty areas.


When you request that FT saves an image, it tries to save the viewed area of the world. What you see should be what you get unless you specify window (export) proportions different than the screen area. FT's Zoom Extents feature assumes that your main window is square and sizes things for that. I don't think that there is a "zoom to active pixels" thing in FT anywhere, but it would probably be a useful feature.




> Also a very usefull thing woulkd be the possibility to pan around even when having open a window like for the incise flow function , so that while watching the preview , in other parts of the world , a lot of time I had to scrap what was done and go back because what looked good in a zone didn't in another, and I was in a zoomed in because from max zoom out is not possible to see details.


FT uses modal dialogs to do most of the user interaction. Changing how the UI works to allow pan and zoom tools to operate on the main display but no others would be a major architectural change. A smaller change of adding a preview window to the various features with an option to update the main view from the preview would be slightly less work, but only slightly. The problem is that FT would need to keep a local copy of the world state to work on and the renderer would need to... Anyway, it's really ugly to implement and would take a very large amount of effort to try to force the current framework to allow for that sort of thing (you'll notice that there's not a preview on the FT version of Incise Flow: it's for very good technical reasons; you may also notice that the incise flow dialog has an odd blank spot at the bottom where Wilbur's has some controls - very suspicious, if you ask me).

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## waldronate

> Thanks , here another small problem , I applied the heightfield computation noise in a selection with a feather of 2 ... 
> but it affecs also the outside ...
> 
> The changed values are :
> 
> size x y z 222 for all and no spherical evaluation , operation type set to multiply and size to 150


The dashed line showing the edge of a selection is the mid-point of the selection values. If we assume that a selection's intensity ranges from 0 (0%=no effect) to 255 (100%=full effect), then the dashed line shows at the place where the selection is 127 (50%). That means that even though your selection may show just a tiny area selected, there may still be parts that can receive up to half of the effect. In Photoshop, there is a warning if there are no pixels in the selection that cross the edge threshold; Wilbur doesn't have the warning. Wilbur also doesn't have the feature that allows you to view the selection as a color on top of the main image (Quick Mask).




> about the above description of the erosion , I am not sure I understood the meaning of :
> 
> how to make it more deep carving?


With the precipiton erosion, what you get in a pass is what you get. If you're doing multiple passes, setting the Blend amount to greater than 100% will give more weight to the newly-eroded terrain when blending, but strange artifacts appear. Using Edit>>Fade to Prior with a value less than -1 will also give interesting effect, but cause strange artifacting. The incise flow operation is controllable, but the precipton one is much less so.

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## Naima

I have done another test and I put size to 1 1 1 and scaling to 10 ... this is the result ... Not sure why I can't get just a slight fractal noise added normally on the whole surface I used multiply because I wanted that some areas got slight under and others slight upper , to create breaking patterns and have less straight fluvial erosion as the % noise is too uniform and also is too much dotted .

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## waldronate

Why use multiply if you want noise added? Why not just use add noise and then offset down to bring the surface back down? For example, using Filter>>Noise>>Fractal Noise with an Operation of Add and an Amplitude of 100 will add numbers from 0 to 100 to your surface followed by using Filter>>Fill>>Set Value with an Operation of Subtract and a value of 50. These two operation have a net effect of adding fractal noise ranging from -50 to +50 onto your existing surface.

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## Naima

I will try that ... 
meanwhile other issue ...

Now I exported the map as mdr from wilbur and loaded into FT ...

The height range is pretty huge in FT , I mean I have peaks of 16000 m and -45000 in under sea ... If I want to bring all among the levels of -9000 and +9000 in FT how could I do  ?I have tried to set that into the world parameters but that sort no effect couse I guess works only for fractal worlds and instead this is a loaded one .

Also I was playing with lightning and color , but when I go to select the color its pretty hard to select when the colors are close and also there is no way to save the selection after having decided what colors indicate what ... or am I wrong?
Also about saving a proper sized image so to have the map exactly the size I want and not the window size in FT  how can I do ?

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## waldronate

Binary Worlds in FT can't be edited in FT.

I don't understand your question about selecting colors in FT. It can be hard to pick an individual color when you have defined many colors, true, but a simple technique is to avoid specifying many colors in the first place. FT interpolates colors, which gives many more effective colors than you selected.

The "Select Coloring Scheme" tab on the Lighting Color window provides a way to save and to load color schemes. You will need to have installed FT in something other than the Program Files directory for things to work correctly because I made a mistake many years ago of keeping user data in the install directory.

Use File>>Export>>Sphere Map Image to write an equirectangular-format image using the current color scheme. I don't think that it's possible to write an image of a precise world size (e.g. Mollweide at 7000 pixels wide) using FT.

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## Naima

ok and how can I do to rescale back the mountain ranges that come from Wilbur ?

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## waldronate

> ok and how can I do to rescale back the mountain ranges that come from Wilbur ?


I do not understand this question. Do you have an example?

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## Naima

1 export from FT to Mdr special and import in wilbur , all fine I work on it do some stuff save as mdr and then I export the 16 bit heightmap .
2 I import the heightmap in world machine I erode some stuff then I export another worked heightmap 

3 I reimport the heightmap in wilbur , this time the heightmap looks as high as 65000 m from 0 and no more from -9000 to 9000 , so I rescale down of -37696 m and reach almoust the right level of sea but , the mountains are pretty high , I can work on them in wilbur though and are usefull as I can selet better the heights, I then export that again as mdr .
4 I import the mdr in FT to work on seasons etc but themountains are incredible high and I wanted to rescale them down to -9000 to 9000  .

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## Naima

Also here another problem...

I generated rivers in FT as they come better there , I need ot export a mask for them , but whenever I try to export it I get this ... 

I have 32 gb why takes so much to make a binary file map ?

Also I didn't find any export setting for a proportioned map only view to skip the viewport one instead .

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## Naima

Also how can I  avoid the wilbur tool of incise flow to create straight incisions? 

I Understood to use the generate nose % but , when I set it to 10 or 5 or whatever it create micronoise that most of the time gets flattened out on subsequent basin fill , but also its not actually relevant for the Larger fluvial erosive basins , and eventually only interacts on smaller ones ... so is there a way to avoid the large overcontinental straights? 

I tought to use for that the fractal noise but in no way I have been able to implement this as I showed in the previous tests and issues I showed you already befoure .

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## waldronate

> 1 export from FT to Mdr special and import in wilbur , all fine I work on it do some stuff save as mdr and then I export the 16 bit heightmap .
> 2 I import the heightmap in world machine I erode some stuff then I export another worked heightmap 
> 
> 3 I reimport the heightmap in wilbur , this time the heightmap looks as high as 65000 m from 0 and no more from -9000 to 9000 , so I rescale down of -37696 m and reach almoust the right level of sea but , the mountains are pretty high , I can work on them in wilbur though and are usefull as I can selet better the heights, I then export that again as mdr .
> 4 I import the mdr in FT to work on seasons etc but themountains are incredible high and I wanted to rescale them down to -9000 to 9000  .


Scale the mountains in Wilbur before sending them to FT. Let me repeat that: scale the mountains in Wilbur before saving the MDR file and opening it to FT because you can't edit the binary data in FT. What comes out of Wilbur is what you'll have in FT when you use it to make a binary world.

A 16-bit PNG has values ranging from 0 to 65535 (0 to 2 raised to the 16th power). If you know that you want mountains to range from -9000 to +9000 (a span of 18000), offset your PNG import to where you want it using Filter>>Fill>>Set Value with Operation Add (or your preferred offset technique), then use Filter>>Fill>>Set Value with Operation Multiply to scale the altitudes to your desired range. The easiest way to figure out the scale value is to use Window>>Histogram to figure out the maximum value and then use a multiply value of (desiredMaxValue / currentMaxValue). For example, if your histogram shows a maximum of 27839 and you'd like the maximum to be 9000, then multiply the surface by 9000/27839 or about 0.3233.

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## waldronate

> Also here another problem...
> 
> I generated rivers in FT as they come better there , I need ot export a mask for them , but whenever I try to export it I get this ... 
> 
> I have 32 gb why takes so much to make a binary file map ?


The retail version of FT is a 32-bit program without the /LARGEADDRESSAWARE flag running. That means that FT gets to use 2GB of memory for all of its operations, including loading the program, undo buffers, binary file mapping into memory, and so on. I have been told that there are experimental versions with the /LARGEADDRESSAWARE flag set that will give FT 4GB of working memory to play with on a 64-bit version of Windows. I have also been told that there is an alpha-level 64-bit version of FT.



> Also I didn't find any export setting for a proportioned map only view to skip the viewport one instead .


I don't understand this statement. FT offers two kinds of image export operations: File>>Save As with Picture Files as the type and File>>Export World>>Sphere Map Image. File>>Save As saves an image using the projection and other parameters displayed in the main window; File>>Export World>>Sphere Map Image saves an Equirectangular projection image that exactly fills the exported image. File>>Save As allows you to specify the width and height of the output image as well as keeping the proportions of the main window; File>>Export World>>Sphere Map Image allows you to specify a width from 16 to 16384 pixels and then uses half of that value as the height. Both operations require enough memory from the 2GB pool to complete their operations. File>>Save As fails with an error message; File>>Export World>>Sphere Map Image fails silently if there's an error.

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## waldronate

> Also how can I  avoid the wilbur tool of incise flow to create straight incisions? 
> 
> I Understood to use the generate nose % but , when I set it to 10 or 5 or whatever it create micronoise that most of the time gets flattened out on subsequent basin fill , but also its not actually relevant for the Larger fluvial erosive basins , and eventually only interacts on smaller ones ... so is there a way to avoid the large overcontinental straights? 
> 
> I tought to use for that the fractal noise but in no way I have been able to implement this as I showed in the previous tests and issues I showed you already befoure .


Generate Percentage Noise adds noise whose magnitude is a percentage of the current altitude: mountains will get more noise than lowlands. If you'd like noise that's uniform over the area of interest, use Filter>>Noise>>Absolute Magnitude Noise instead: enter a value equal to about percentage of the average area's altitude (for an area that's about 1000 high and 5% noise, enter 50).

The standard long-river procedure is: fill basins to get overall connectivity, absolute magnitude noise to break up the flat areas that result long straight rivers, fill basins to reestablish connectivity, and find rivers.

I thought that I already explained how to use Filter>>Calculate Height Field as a workaround to the limitation in Filter>>Noise>>Fractal Noise.

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## Naima

Is there a way to Break furher the pattern on already done rivers ? I went in photoshop to fix tsome but are many ... 

Als orepeating the incise flow sevral times with an flow exponent lower it lowers the whole selection sometimes causing a visible step down like around higher areas that are bordering the selection , the idea I had was to create further incise flows on the sides of main rivers but seems that everytime I apply the incise flow it keeps taking always the same already carved flows without adding further ones on sides, so the result is mostly deepening and deepenign the already carved ones .
Is there a way to add more mini sub rivers that go on the sides of the main ones ? I tried apply the erose from 0 to 555555 , the precipitation , but there are not visible carving even after 3 passes , dunno why I can only see those when I apply on coast mostly .

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## waldronate

> Is there a way to Break furher the pattern on already done rivers ? I went in photoshop to fix tsome but are many ...


If you have long, straight river sections there probably isn't much to do to break them up except adding enough noise to make the river go around the noise. One thing that I've done when I'm planning to use Photoshop to assemble the final image is to export coloring that I like, fill basins, add lots of noise, fill basins again, and add a river mask from that (don't save the modified surface). The rivers will have more detail in the river mask than they would in the color image, but the color image created in Photoshop will have nicely wandering rivers that are usually close enough to the terrain to avoid awkward questions.



> Als orepeating the incise flow sevral times with an flow exponent lower it lowers the whole selection sometimes causing a visible step down like around higher areas that are bordering the selection , the idea I had was to create further incise flows on the sides of main rivers but seems that everytime I apply the incise flow it keeps taking always the same already carved flows without adding further ones on sides, so the result is mostly deepening and deepenign the already carved ones .
> Is there a way to add more mini sub rivers that go on the sides of the main ones ? I tried apply the erose from 0 to 555555 , the precipitation , but there are not visible carving even after 3 passes , dunno why I can only see those when I apply on coast mostly .


Flow is always computed on the whole surface. That means that the original river pattern will be produced again: you won't get a deeper result.
How much height is removed is the incise flow function of the steepness of the landscape and the magnitude of the altitude. Areas very near sea level don't get eroded as much. There is in fact a clipping operation that happens to prevent flow from going below sea level (it's one of the differences between the "Amount" and "Effect Blend": "Amount" has clipping, "Effect Blend" doesn't).

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## Naima

what's actually effect blend does though ? 
I usually set it to 0.8 and not sure of what it allows though ... 

while I usually use flow exponent between 0.4 and 0.6 that seems to depress the landscape more or less making so more carved in or less flows .

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## waldronate

When the system does the incise flow operation, it computes the result in a temporary surface and the blends that effect back into the main surface. Effect Blend specifies how strongly that blend occurs (0 means no effect, 1 means full effect, 2 means 2 times the effect, 3 means three times the effect, and so on). Setting an effect larger than 1 will carve channels below sea level, a decidedly unrealistic effect. The Amount field has a similar effect, but it won't let the incise operation go below sea level (where the altitude is 0). Setting the Effect Blend to 0.8 lets 80% of the erosion result through.

Exponent controls how much of the flow map affects the final result. The flow map is a function of the number of pixels upstream of the current pixel. It's an ugly exponential result. The exponent allows you to control the relative intensity of the mouth of the river to the highest upstream element.

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## Naima

Thanks , I was now passing to make the climates , I remember You said I can do  a climate overlay based on a different setting to not have stripes lines , but I cant find that feature , where I do find it?

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## Naima

Also is there a way to "smooth" the borders of rivers that are too much cutted inside a mountain  ? I applied the incision flow and got good results on some areas but on high mountains they cutted too much in rivers and now look more like a reticle labirynth , is there some filters or tricks ot apply to make those mountains back to better normalization but preserve the other areas ?

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## waldronate

> Thanks , I was now passing to make the climates , I remember You said I can do  a climate overlay based on a different setting to not have stripes lines , but I cant find that feature , where I do find it?


FT has three climate shaders: all are based on a table with average annual rainfall on one axis and average annual temperature on the other. The Climate shader (Map>>Show Climate) uses the results of the table lookup to select a solid color. The Textured Climate shader (Map>>Show Textured Climate) uses the results of the table lookup to select a tiled image. Finally, the Image Climate shader (Map>>Show Image Climate) uses a color image directly as the color lookup without consulting an intermediate table.

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## waldronate

> Also is there a way to "smooth" the borders of rivers that are too much cutted inside a mountain  ? I applied the incision flow and got good results on some areas but on high mountains they cutted too much in rivers and now look more like a reticle labirynth , is there some filters or tricks ot apply to make those mountains back to better normalization but preserve the other areas ?


Do you have an example image? And preferably another that shows a similar area without the effects that are troubling you.

It's possible that Wilbur's Filter>>Morphological>>Dilate and Filter>>Morphological>>Erode might be of some use here. A median filter might also be helpful, but there isn't one in Wilbur. And finally, there's a process involving selecting the slopes and blurring that might help.

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## Naima

Here the image , same filtering applied , but on one looks all good , the other, the massive mountain block liiks bad couse eroded too much into the mountians .

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## Naima

Also is there a way to ,if I select a valley with the mountain , make so that the mountains get higher and the valley lower?

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## waldronate

> Here the image , same filtering applied , but on one looks all good , the other, the massive mountain block liiks bad couse eroded too much into the mountians .


Try this (animated GIF, 5 seconds per frame, so keep watching):


You'll probably need to select the mountainous areas first and feather that selection before doing the dilate/erode steps and it's likely that you'll need a value greater than 2 to close up those valleys.

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## Naima

I can find the Show climate and show image climate but I can't find show textured climate in the menu pop up window, perhaps you mean Gaia? In wich case I dunno where going to Alterate it?

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## waldronate

> I can find the Show climate and show image climate but I can't find show textured climate in the menu pop up window, perhaps you mean Gaia? In wich case I dunno where going to Alterate it?


Textured climate has been in FT since version 3.0.3 (it's between "Show Image Climate" and "Next World"). I screwed up when specifying the UI and it tends to auto-hide some entries on the Map menu, so click on any little arrow on that menu to see all of the options.

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## Naima

Ahhh , Indeed ... "the secret Option" its actualy looks like a secret passage , u need to push a button and appears .

Ok now I see a texture climate setup with tundra or alpine , boeral etc .. but what do I have to do there? its replacing the gaia iamge or something else?

btw what climate is hills, mountains , rock?

also if I replace those base textures, what size can I use as max and will it be visible in FT?

Also if I paint directly a climate zone , do the relative temperature and rainfall regulate accordingly ?

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## waldronate

> Ok now I see a texture climate setup with tundra or alpine , boeral etc .. but what do I have to do there? its replacing the gaia iamge or something else?


It's just another shader, like Altitude, Climate, Gaia, or Image Climate. The idea is that the flat colors of the Climate shader are replaced by a tiled image for each climate type. It's something that can be done fairly easily in a paint program like Photoshop, but this feature allows for an implementation directly in FT.



> btw what climate is hills, mountains , rock?


Those climate types are used by FT's Simple Create mode and will not be created by FT as part of its normal operation: you have to paint them in directly. The reason FT has "climate" types and not "biome" types is that there are things that can get painted into that layer that aren't biomes.



> also if I replace those base textures, what size can I use as max and will it be visible in FT?


There isn't a cap on the image sizes, but FT will crash if you overload its addressing space. Also, the images don't have to be the same size: you can have more detail in some climate types than in others.



> Also if I paint directly a climate zone , do the relative temperature and rainfall regulate accordingly?


No. FT doesn't implement this feature in the climate painting.

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## Naima

Thanks, I was doing also a zoom in the heightmap in Photoshop , but this seems to produce unwanted artifacts when I enlarge and reimport in wilbur etc ... 

so I picked the original world map in wilbur , the source for the main heightmap and I did a crop to selection to the desired to be zoomed area , now How can I do to enlarge that area to the size of the original dimensions of 16384 x 8192 to have more detailed in erosion?

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## waldronate

Try Surface>>Resample>>Simple to chop out a portion of your world for a zoom.

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## Naima

Perhaps I repeat something already asked, but I can't find a way to export without the viewport borders, I selected export world as sphere image , select png , select the size 16384 , type the name but when I click save nothing happens , the window closes and nothing is saved ... perhaps I am missing something?

also is it possible to import directly from out of FT a Climate map worked out in PS to apply inside FT and get use of the textured climate ?

or also import rain and temperature maps?

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## waldronate

In FT, the Export Sphere Map Image is limited to the in-memory capability of FT (unlike File>>Save As:Special MDR, which has no such limits). This in-memory requirement give a maximum practical size of around 6000 to 8000 pixels, depending on a whole host of factors. It would certainly be nice to give a useful error message instead of the old error message (which was the Windows notification after FT crashed). If you would like to try to get a few extra GB of working space with the retail 32-bit FT version on a 64-bit version of Windows, Large Address Aware | TechPowerUp Forums offers a way to set the /LARGEADDRESSAWARE flag on the FT executable.

I can't think of a way to use an external climate map with FT. However, it should be possible to get the same effect directly in Photoshop using layer masks and tiled texture layers.

I don't think FT will import rainfall or temperature maps. Its primary stated function was to export, after all...

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## Naima

Ok thanks , do unknow how in photoshop I can do to blend the different layers or levels or climatic zone maps one into the other?

As for the rain and the temperatures , on what are based how are calculated? I was planning to use them as a basis and then refine some areas according to the pression zones I designed , and change them ...

Working inside ft directly on those to get the desired. Climate appear in a zone is quite hard especially to make appear chaparral / mediterranean combo .

Also how can I lower the limits of the temperature or rainfall to a certain max and minimum? I do not want for example erroneously reach 149 F but I woudl like to set the maximum to 100 .

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## waldronate

You should be able to blur the layer masks to get the edges smooth. Adding a little noise and playing with the knockout should allow for a transition that's a little nicer than a straight blend.

According to the FTv1 manual, temperature and rainfall are computed as shown below.

I don't think it's changed much since then except that an option has been provided to specify the base temperature directly instead of using the physical model of albedo, solar input, and greenhouse feedback.

Looking at the FT climate table ( http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/climateinfo.gif ) shows that most of the interesting transitional climate types occur only in a very narrow band of rainfall. In the real world, of course, timing of the rainfall makes a huge difference in the final climate type. Timing is affected very strongly by atmospheric transport due to heating (the typical monsoon is such a case), and FT doesn't have a model for that. It's always instructive to load up a height map for Earth  and use the default climate model to see what FT generates. It's not much like what we see on a regular map...

There isn't a way to force min and max values for things in FT, sorry. You'll need to do that sort of thing by hand.

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## Naima

There is an amount of fractal though ? Because I tried to generate worlds with 0 roughness and 0 land and I could get all different distributions...

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## Naima

Also another question , in Wilbur my max elevation its 10000 and minimum -11000 , I guess I can rescale them as I did once but I forgot the tool , but when I save and import in FT the heights are different and I get ranges of up to 35000 m in highest and - 35000 lowest , what's happening?

nvm I forgot to change the metric units .

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## waldronate

In FT, Map>>World Settings brings up a property sheet with multiple pages. On the Temperature page, there are two groups of settings and another three settings: the two groups specify the world's base temperature and the last two specify the amount of fBm randomness added to the equator-to-pole temperature variance. The first setting (axial tilt) controls the distribution of the variance. If you make a flat world (set land roughness edit to 0) and set the temperature random and variance to 0, the world will have the same temperature everywhere. Increasing the variance to 100 will give a difference in temperature between the equator and poles of 100 degrees. Increasing the Random factor to 20 will add an fBm randomness of 20, giving an overall world variance of up to 120 degrees from the base value.

The rainfall page lacks the variance parameter, but has the base value and random amounts that operate in the same way.

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## Naima

Do u think a system like the one described in pixie climate page could be implemented in FT ? Making the whole thing more precise and automatic?

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## Naima

Btw , I also wanted to make an enlargement , as you said I was able to do , but , my problem is that I woudl like to split more the mountain ranges, whenever I apply further flow or erosion they tend to just take the same areas and keep carving in there , I woudl like to preserve the main mountain ranges as a "direction for mountain groups, but give them more realistic appearence like if it was a zoomed in area now ... Not sure if I expressed myself ... Is there a way to achieve that in or out of FT and wilbur?

Imagine see the Earth from space then make a zoom on Mediterranean sea and europe .. mountains woudl look more detailed, more valleys more rivers, more plains etc ... while from space they woudll look like a single main mountain chain, only large flat areas woudl be visible etc... also flat areas when zoomed become flat huge areas missing any local detail there ... but I fear to add other noise for not breaking the already fragile river flow patterns for the main ones ...

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## waldronate

> Do u think a system like the one described in pixie climate page could be implemented in FT ? Making the whole thing more precise and automatic?


It's possible to do just about anything in software. All it takes is time and money. FT is my third-priority project for my free time and only gets attention intermittently. There are a whole lot of things on the bug list to do for it before getting to significant new features, unfortunately.

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## waldronate

As far as zooming goes, there are pretty serious limits on how far you can do a zoom while maintaining consistency with larger-area maps. As you pointed out, the biggest problem is the river network. For correctness, a river-finding algorithm needs to run at a fairly constant scale. In the real world, this scale is on the order of micrometers and the larger elements form from smaller ones. In FT and Wilbur, it's the native (editing) resolution of the world. Nothing outside the map can affect the rivers, so they need to be calculated on a whole-world basis. And in FT, the projection is not really suited for the task, leading to oddly-routed rivers with inappropriate numbers of them in the polar regions. I know some techniques that I could use to get better results, but all of them involve user intervention and/or a massive rewrite of FT's internals.

Because river-finding is so context sensitive, it's important to have the information from off-map when trying to cut a finer-detail map. This information is potentially available in FT if rivers have been found, but FT never tries to use it because the erosion operations are a whole-world activity at editing resolution. It's like dynamic fractalization of rivers: it's a possible thing to do, but the practical implementation (e.g. self-intersection avoidance) is difficult to get balanced between usability and quality of results. Note that this off-surface information just doesn't exist for Wilbur at all. What's on Wilbur's map is all there is.

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## Naima

So so its not possible even in Photoshop to apply some tricks?

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## waldronate

> So so its not possible even in Photoshop to apply some tricks?


Assuming the question is about zooming in on river flows, then I'm not sure what tricks would be applicable. The problem is that there isn't enough information on a zoomed-in area to generate flows that are necessarily consistent with the flows of the world at large.

If the question is about climate generation, you can get the high and low pressure things in Photoshop from a land mask and a sea mask using a shapeburst stroke layer style (it's only good up to 255 pixels, but that should be enough; climate models don't generally need to be a high-resolution thing). The hard parts are getting the flow gradient directions around the highs and lows along with intensity. It's easy enough to do with an external program, but I'm not sure how to do that directly in Photoshop. Then those wind and ocean current directions need to iterate a few times to get useful amount of heat transport. I don't think that it's something that can be easily point-evaluated in isolation.

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## Naima

Mm, no I meant more to break the pattern of mountains , but keep the main river shapes , in a way to introduce more different mountainrange nested in the previous larger ones.

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## waldronate

> Mm, no I meant more to break the pattern of mountains , but keep the main river shapes , in a way to introduce more different mountainrange nested in the previous larger ones.


None that I can think of, sorry. Without the larger context, it's pretty much impossible to get rivers that carry across map borders in a reasonable manner.

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## Naima

Ok , thanks, btw I have exagerated with the erosion and did erode too much the coast with the precipitation , to fix the problem I have blurred and blurred the borders, but , didn't come out very well, the problem is I can't go back .... is there a way to fix too much rounded coasts that are vrey fragmented?

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## waldronate

Did you try Filter>>Morphological>>Dilate followed by Filter>>Morphological>>Erode?

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## Naima

Works only on the coastline ? as I dont want to change mountains or rivers.

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## waldronate

Select just the coastline first, then...

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## Naima

Here is another small problem ... 

I was working on the Enlarged area, I scaled it up again to 16k image, I go for finding rivers and it finds correct rivers, but when I click ok river overlay disappear , arenot visible , no matter waht I do on show image river overlays .

Any ideas?

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## waldronate

If you're not getting vector rivers, but are relying on the "Keep River Image Overlay" checkbox in Find Rivers, then you are running afoul of a bug in FT. It's not one that I've been able to reliably reproduce, so it's not one that I can fix.

If you have checked the "Keep River Image Overlay" checkbox in Find Rivers, then the blocky image used for river routing is stored as an image overlay for the world. Use Image Overlays>>Show Overlay Window to bring up the Image Overlays window, select the "River Channels" image overlay and click the Show button.

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## Naima

Ok I will try that , btw , I to break the mountain patterns I did :

in Photoshop created different layers of varying sizes of difference clouds, differentiated them one from the other ( same type for each though , then I have stacked two layers of those one over the other in overlay mode or similar and then I have overlayed all on the heightmap with an exclusion map of that same map inverted in the mask channels . this allowed me to break the lower patterns without breaking the mountains , I then used a silouhette of the sea to cover parts of the coasts interiors with a drop shadow in normal mode to keep consistant the sea color height , I saved , imported in Wilbur and then I had to adjoust the heights and do some height clipping for some few areas ( of course I saved befoure the sea mask I wanted to have ). 
Result seems acceptable and actually added some other extra mountain features that seem out of a Only fluvial erosion ...

At least I like it ^^ ...

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## Naima

Btwhow works deterracing? 

for some reasons , when applying selectively on heights the incise flow I have created in some areas some stepped heights , is it possible to fix with that deterrace or somehow else?

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## waldronate

> Btwhow works deterracing? 
> 
> for some reasons , when applying selectively on heights the incise flow I have created in some areas some stepped heights , is it possible to fix with that deterrace or somehow else?


Deterracing is for removing large perfectly flat areas as would occur when importing an image created from filled contours. It's pretty much useless in any other situation.

The selection only has 256 possible levels (it's an 8-bit image). I keep meaning to convert it to a full 32-bit floating-point buffer like the regular surfaces, but for now it may result in little steps, especially if the selection wasn't feathered much or if the surface has large elevation differences. A very small blur (0.5 or so) on the surface will reduce the problem at the cost of an overall smoothing (unless you select the altitudes from just below to just above the troublesome stepped areas and then blur the surface).

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## Naima

Ok so basically some blurring , erode dilate isn't usefull I guess...

btw I have again to make you compliments for those two little jewell programs, the more I dig into them and use , despite I am finding some bugs  or  experiencing problems due to my too far stretched ambitions , are really Extremely versatile , usefull , well tought and I feel you had put a lot of passion and interest in geography shaping when you created them ... I would really like to learn how you did arive to program something like that even just for perhaps make some small little tools to do the things that are not possible to do otherwise like a climate program based on the pixie possible algorythm .

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## Naima

Btw a strange happening ... 

In Wilbur I can see a nicely rendered view of the terrain , it seems to me that also heights are lighlty shadowed, can this be influenced anyway ? Without going to FT I mean ... 

I have reproduced the similar effect using just the heightmap , render a white overlay layer with a light directional and using the alha channel of that layer with the heightmap , I set up the height and the intensity and I get the same similar shaded effect, but I notice that when I do this in the photoshop the resulting image has visible all layers of steps of the heights , while those are not visible in the heihgtmap or the Wilbur outputs, why do you think I get those stepped results in my rendering ? I saved the heightmap out of wilbur as 16 bit .

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## waldronate

> Btw a strange happening ... 
> 
> In Wilbur I can see a nicely rendered view of the terrain , it seems to me that also heights are lighlty shadowed, can this be influenced anyway ? Without going to FT I mean ... 
> 
> I have reproduced the similar effect using just the heightmap , render a white overlay layer with a light directional and using the alha channel of that layer with the heightmap , I set up the height and the intensity and I get the same similar shaded effect, but I notice that when I do this in the photoshop the resulting image has visible all layers of steps of the heights , while those are not visible in the heihgtmap or the Wilbur outputs, why do you think I get those stepped results in my rendering ? I saved the heightmap out of wilbur as 16 bit .


I'm not sure what you're requesting here. A screenshot with the problem areas highlighted would probably be helpful for me.

The data in Wilbur (and FT) is stored as 32-bit floating-point numbers, which gives you roughly 24 bits of precision. The default for Photoshop and other paint programs is 8-bit data (usually with separate red, green, blue, and alpha channels). Converting the terrain from 24-bit to 8-bit loses a lot of data. Photoshop can work with 16-bit or 32-bit channels, but there are a lot fewer filters available. To ensure that you're working with 16-bit channels and not 8-bit channels, check Image>>Mode in Photoshop and ensure that the checkbox is next to 16 bits/channel.

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