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Fractal Terrains -- Too Many Rivers

TidrecTidrec
in Mapping with ProFantasy's Software
For some reason, I keep getting too many rivers on my FT maps. I create the world randomly, then Fill the Basins with Lakes, then Generate Rivers. I set the rivers to medium or fine (it doesn't seem to make a difference in the number of rivers), check Potential Flow and Save Overlay. When it's done rendering (which takes several minutes), I've got a world covered in rivers. Obviously, I could use the exlusion mask to prevent generation in certain areas, but that rather defeats the purpose of having it done randomly. Any suggestions?
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Comments

  • dutch206dutch206
    edited April 2008
    Well, first of all, thank you very much. I am just getting into the 'meat and potatoes' of FT, so I wasn't aware you could do this. I've been exporting to CC and doing this stuff by hand!!

    I created a sample world, filled in the basins and told FT to generate rivers. You're right. The world appears to be rather river-intensive. It's as if the entire planet looked like south-central Africa or the lakes region of Minnesota. Still, it's an impressive sight.

    edit: After playing around some more, I have also noticed that sometimes, horizontal banding shows up on the map after you execute the rivers command. These horizontal bands show up if the map is exported to CC2, so it isn't a visual glitch: Those lines are actually being added to the FT map.
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  • JetdriverJetdriver
    Can't you change the river length?....I tried it out quickly and found that if you use say medium to fine setting and slide the river length slider once it has 'found rivers' then you can reduce the number of rivers displayed. The longer the river setting the more rivers you end up with. Basically I found that a few steps down from the longest setting was giving quite a nice effect. Nice long rivers from up in the mountains with a couple of tributaries forking together. Once you go longer then you end up with the spider web effect. Shorter rivers does just that makes them into little stubs that start just before the lake/ocean.

    No idea about the horizontal banding

    Cheers
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  • 27 days later
  • dutch206dutch206
    Well, I think I finally figured out a solution to the "Vertical lines" portion of my problem. Here's a quote from the User's Guide, of all places:

    "FT has a habit of displaying perfectly straight segments of lines from about –180 to –90 longitude on the map when shown in the equirectangular projection. Using a different projection or ensuring that the –180 longitude line is off the display edge will make these lines disappear."
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  • 10 years later
  • WilliamsRDanWilliamsRDan
    Maybe this is 10 years too late, but I can help you with the problem...

    The issue is your order of operations. Don't fill the basins with water before you run the rivers, run the rivers first, then the basins will fill on top of the rivers. Otherwise the rivers are just looking for the nearest body of water and will end in a lake. If you run the rivers first, they will flow towards ocean level water.

    Just be sure that your river color is the same as the color of your water during image export or you'll have a lot of tiny adjustments in Photoshop.

    Cheers!
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