Getting rivers from FT3 to CC3+
EDIT: Oops, looks like this question has been asked before, but what is in those threads isn't much help.
EDIT: And then, suddenly, it works. I noticed that during "Find Rivers", I saw a progress dialog that said something like "Routing rivers in vector overlay". Is there some reason that would happen sometimes and not others?
Within the FT3 settings for exporting to CC, there does not seem to be a way to include rivers.
Q1: Is this correct?
I tried exporting the rivers overlay separately in hopes of importing it into CC to some good effect. However, I encountered several obstacles to doing this. 1) The background of the exported image produced by FT3 is black instead of transparent. 2) Even if I use an image editing program to make the background transparent, when imported into CC the background ... (wait for it) ... turns black.
Q2: Am I missing settings that export(FT3) or import(CC) images (PNG) with transparent backgrounds?
3) If I nevertheless persist and try manually tracing the imported image in CC onto another sheet, I find that I can't get the result scaled and aligned with the land properly without so much fiddling that I begin to think, say, I'll probably get just as good results redrawing the rivers completely by hand.
Q3: Has anyone a different approach to doing this? (preferably a successful one :))
EDIT: And then, suddenly, it works. I noticed that during "Find Rivers", I saw a progress dialog that said something like "Routing rivers in vector overlay". Is there some reason that would happen sometimes and not others?
Within the FT3 settings for exporting to CC, there does not seem to be a way to include rivers.
Q1: Is this correct?
I tried exporting the rivers overlay separately in hopes of importing it into CC to some good effect. However, I encountered several obstacles to doing this. 1) The background of the exported image produced by FT3 is black instead of transparent. 2) Even if I use an image editing program to make the background transparent, when imported into CC the background ... (wait for it) ... turns black.
Q2: Am I missing settings that export(FT3) or import(CC) images (PNG) with transparent backgrounds?
3) If I nevertheless persist and try manually tracing the imported image in CC onto another sheet, I find that I can't get the result scaled and aligned with the land properly without so much fiddling that I begin to think, say, I'll probably get just as good results redrawing the rivers completely by hand.
Q3: Has anyone a different approach to doing this? (preferably a successful one :))
Comments
Q2: FT does not provide the option to save the river overlay with a transparent background, if I recall correctly. CC3 should be able to import PNGs with transparent backgrounds, however. Which CC3 command are you using to insert the image file?
Q3: FT has historically had a problem with generating unreasonably large values for one or two points on the surface during its river generation. These wild points dominate the river calculations, which keeps vector rivers from generating correctly (the image overlay is unaffected because it's a simple threshold; vector generation tries to reason about the problem and using reason never works quite the way we hope). As you have discovered, slightly changing the size of the river calculations is often enough to avoid generating those wild points and allows the system to calculate reasonable values.