FT3 trenches
davehogg56
Newcomer
I'm trying to build a world from scratch in FT3 and, like everyone, I'm struggling with the odd elevations and the lack of a working climate model. I've found a couple posts where "Quenten", who seems like a lovely bloke, posts his workflow when building a new planet.
However, I've had some issues. First, there's this step: "Set at 0.01 – 0.05, tool size 100 – 250 (change the size of the tool when getting to really small details like small islands."
Setting the tool to 100 - the low end of the suggestion - gives me a circle that's roughly 8,000 miles wide. There's a tiny brush in the middle, but using it at 0.01 bulldozes large swathes of land, and not the ones touched by the brush.
Making the tool 5x5 gives me a small circle, but doesn't appear to make anything happen. I'm not an idiot - I can paint rainfall changes all day - but Paint Raise Prescale Land Offset isn't clicking.
I skipped that step, accepted my mountains will be in the middle of continents and moved down the list. Eventually, I got to this: "Tools > Actions > Incise Flow: amount 3.5; Flow 0.35; Effect 0.25; Blur 2"
Here's the result:
That's just not a natural-looking feature. They appear to be trenches that are deeper than the planet's core, surrounded by mountains that are several million feet high. I'm not a geographer by trade, but I'm pretty sure that's not supposed to happen.
Help?
Comments
Hi Dave :)
I'm not very familiar with Quenten's method, but I immediately felt that skipping any of the steps might not be a great idea. FT3 workflows can easily break down if they aren't followed to the exact letter. This is an issue with all FT3 workflows, not just Quenten's.
If the Prescale brushes are not clickable, then it is likely that you may have forgotten to click Apply after setting the Editing resolution in the Editing tab of the World Settings.
I'm not sure I understand what happened with the incise flow, since I don't usually use the built in FT3 one myself.
Not to try and discredit anything that @Loopysue suggested as I'm quite certain that she knows far more about this than I do, but it looks like there's a small box on the east coast of your northern continent: have you used the selection tools at all? Because if so, I don't think you'll be able to edit anything outside of the selection box while it's there. If you had it active when you were trying to paint with the prescale brushes, it might also explain why they weren't doing anything.
I'm afraid I've got no idea what's going on with the incise flow either, sorry.
Ah, well I think you might have solved it there, BlackYeti :)
I didn't notice the selection at all ;)
I've got home now, so I've been able to experiment a little with the incise flow command. Having thought about it some more I thought that the precise rectangular shape of the trenches seemed suspicious, so I applied the rectangular selection tool to a portion of a freshly generated canvas and exaggerated the parameters of the command quite a bit. This was the result:
For this, I simply used the same parameters you specified but removed the decimal points. It's clearly not as extreme as what you've got, but it looks to me like the same kind of problem.
Remove the selections and try the command again with much lower parameters, and I think it should work as it's supposed to. But as Loopysue pointed out above, you should probably do the prior steps first.
I hope this helps. ?
On the positive side, this has given me a great idea for a world with a giant artificial trench around it... I'm not saying it was aliens, but...?
Thanks for the suggestions!!
The tiny selection was the 1X1 tool that I was trying to use to sculpt that coastline. That was the last thing I tried before hitting incise flow and getting trenched.
I feel like I have something set wrong, because my 100-size tools are way too big and the incise flow commands are responding like I'm not putting in a decimal point. I'll keep experimenting, though. Thank you.
Aha! For some reason, I have to set editing to Custom/4096, hit "Apply" and then immediately close the World Settings window. If I try to change something else after I hit "Apply", editing resets to small. Now a 100-pixel tool looks sane!
I was hoping that getting the edit setting right would solve the trench problem, but it didn't. However, the trench is much thinner, which has allowed me to realize something - it is happening exactly on the 180-degree longitude line. Does that ring any bells?
I'm using the workflow discussed in this post: https://forum.profantasy.com/discussion/comment/64631 and I haven't skipped any steps. Everything looks great until I incise flows, which is when the weirdness starts on the 180th parallel.
(I've dropped the incise flow amount to 0.35, and I'm still getting the trenches. I've also tried the settings in http://www.fracterra.com/CGTutorial/ with the same result.)
It looks like Incise Flow has some sort of emotional breakdown when routing across The Seam At The Back Of The World. If at all possible, I recommend avoiding the -180 to +180 wraparound. One way to avoid it is to move the land around so that it's just water over the seam. You can do this using Map>>World Settings to bring up the World Settings property page, then select the Secondary Page, and, finally, adjust the Longitude setting to get that seam over ocean.
I had the same problem, and by trial and error, luck and inspiration, found the solution that joe has mentioned above. Incise flow needs some Valium.
And on odd days of the month I can be nice. Even days.......