ProFantasy Fractal Terrain - Polos World
DrakonFG
Newcomer
Hi guys!
I have the FT3 for a quite while already but I never had the time to play much with it.
Before I enter into my problem, let me give some context about my intents with the software it self.
I'm a writher and a game developer in my free time, that I didn't had much in the last few years, sadly. Well, I was searching for a software that easily allowed me to build and create words for my project, even if just for a prototype case. Then in my search I found ProFantasy, and as it happens that I was a Dungeon Master of D&D, i was amazed by the softwares and I lvoed the FT3, it was quite what I precisely was looking for.
And now we arrived on my problem...
Sometimes I like to create my contents from scratch, specially for my games and books projects, but the POLOs of the word generate quite well, but I can't easily edit it. As you can see in the first picture bellow, the selection can't close the edges and the center always keep that circle open... even if I pick a generated world with POLO, if I want to modify that part, that simply is not possible, because the FT3, how I and say, bloor every thing, as you can see my try on the second picture.
Even if I try in the EQUIRECTANGULAR view, it is very hard to edit that part of the planet. Picture 3
I don't know if I'm doing something wrong or just it is not possible to do it at FT3.
Can someone please help me, give me a hint or clarify what I'm doing wrong.
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Comments
Hi DrakonFG :)
It is a bit tricky knowing exactly what your process is. How are you setting up your file and working on it? Are you following any set of 'How To' instructions?
The Setting you mean by:
Synthetic World, Roughness, Percent Sea, Land size?
I try a bunch of variation there, even tried the differents Methods available, the problem is in the software it self when I try to edit the POLES from the world, TOP and BOTTOM... trying to select all, FT3 don't select the top corner or bottom corner, in any projection.
tying to edit by hand it became how I printed, image 2.
Is there any discord server? Because I read the FT3 document and there was nothing that could help me.
It might help if you had some kind of established workflow of some kind that has been successfully used by many other mappers.
Depending on what version of FT you are using you may might have access to the One Day Worldbuilder pdf. It comes free with FT3.5. Even if you are still using FT3 you could download and install FT3.5 just for the pdf. The download should be available under the same group of files on your Downloads tab when you log into your account on the main webpage.
It's a pretty long read (though actually its mostly pictures), but there is a supplemental notes pdf that covers creating your own world from a blank world, such as you are doing right now, and it was written for FT3.
Without transferring files (FT3 files are simply enormous), you might want to look at that for a basic workflow, or at least to get some ideas about how to solve some of your current workflow problems. You won't need to do all the last bits of the process which are concerned with transferring your world to CC3 for CC3 mapping projects.
This is just an idea. You don't have to do it that way if you don't want to.
As a plus, the One Day Worldbuilder will show you how to take your world from FT3 to a really handy piece of free software called 'Wilbur', where you can play with erosion, and then bring the file back to FT3 again.
EDIT: sorry - no Discord that I am aware of.
Oh, that is why the FT3_Essentials talk about that software... I didn't pick the idea at first... I will try it
FT3.5 = would it be the FT3plus?
Oh yes. Sorry. I meant FT3+
Mind on other things today!
There is more documents for FT3... I didn't saw them... great, more reading material!
Yes, there are always a number of files under each download title. The ODW is only installed with FT3+, but it might be as well to have and at least glance through the other manuals as well.
FT has always had a problem with editing in the polar areas. The main issue is that the editing data is stored in the Equirectangular projection, meaning that there is extreme distortion of editing data near the poles because there are many more editing points across the map near the poles than there are near the equator. If you set FT's main display to show the Equirectangular projection, you will see that the painting brush is nice and round from the equator to the poles. Unfortunately, in any other projection, it has various sorts of distortions and usually becomes a sort of triangular thing near the poles.
The best solution, unfortunately, involves drawing your map in a third-party paint program and the distorting the results for import into FT. How large your polar continent will be will have a direct bearing on what the best projection to use for painting is. I would recommend using something like a stereographic projection because it's relatively simple to understand, but you can use whatever projection you're interested in. I recommend using FT to get an image of a grid in the polar aspect using the projection that you'll be painting in and then use that projection image as a guide in your paint program when you're laying down your continent. Ideally, you would use a square image with a grayscale color scheme using black as the lowest point in your terrain and white as the highest.
After you have an image of your polar continent, use a program such as ReprojectImage ( http://fracterra.com/ReprojectImage.zip - it's not https because I haven't gotten around to getting a certificate for the site that never lets you give it any secrets at all: you may need to manually enter the http://fracterra.com/ address to get your browser to be quiet about irrelevant things ). The idea would be to load your square grayscale image into ReprojectImage and then pick the desired input projection, align the grid over your image, and then export the Equirectangular image to a BMP file and load that file as a binary surface in FT. The use the Tools>>Actions>>Burn In To Surface tool in FT to push that image into editing data. It's a long and ugly process and is really something that FT should be able to do on its own, but FT hasn't sprouted that feature quite yet.