Continental Shelves Turn White in Wilbur
smhollingsworth
Traveler
I have used the Annual 155 Worldbuilding Tutorial perhaps a dozen times and have never run into the following problem. I really don't understand what is going on. If I edit a map in FT3, then save it as a special MDR file, and open it in Wilbur, once I set the land and sea shaders to the ones from the tutorial, the continental shelves turn white. It looks like plaster surrounding my landmasses. The sculpting seems to work correctly, it just seems there is something wrong with the altitude or how the shader is getting applied or something. I've done everything the same way I've done numerous times before. I thought maybe it was just the one map in the pic, below, but even one that hasn't been edited in FT3 does this.
I'm also having a problem with the MDR file after editing it in Wilbur, where it has no file info during the import back into FT3 and just looks like noise if I use the file settings taken from the file I originally saved from FT3. Not sure if that is related or a separate problem.
Comments
The shader works better without continental shelves, which I think it recommends.
Try editing the colours of the shader. You can access them the same way you loaded the shader.
I figured it out. I completely skipped the step to set Lightness Max to 0 when setting the sea shader to Wilbur HC Blend - sea. All working again.
That's good. I should have been able to tell you that, but I can barely remember the details after 5 years.
Lightness on the sea coloring is a lovely example of laziness in action. I wanted to be able to use just a few colors for the sea coloring, but still get a smooth-shaded gradient across the whole color list. I should have gone with "fade toward color" that interpolated toward a specific color, but what got implemented was "fade toward white" that just adds rgb_white*scaled_altitude to the RGB color, which is why it goes to white at the top in unpredictable, non-perceptual ways (it's dependent on both the rgb color and the lightness min/max parameters). It's a fiddly parameter to control but it met my need for that day. And here we are some decades later...