Fractal Terrain: Some questions about it

Replicators

If you notice in my attachment when trying to make a world when viewing from gaia i get this white annoying cloud thing at the top and bottom, and ive tried alot of things and could not get rid of it. If any of you can tell me if its supposed to be there, or if its because im using windows vista 64 bit version and the program don't work right in it, i don't know the program seems to run fine, just some things are weird or just don't work right.

Also, when saving to png/bmp/jpg/or w/e i want the size of the map to be bigger, but it seems to fill most of it with a white border and i don't want that. I wanna split the map up in several parts to use with RPG inferno v3, so the map size in total needs to be much bigger, cause the parts need to be about 800 px width.

Bidmaron

This is, I believe by design and is the polar icecaps and high altitude glaciers.

Replicators

Anyway to get rid of it?

jslayton

No.

Zedarius

What about the second part of the question? I, too, am trying to export these maps in high resolution format, but it keeps the map at low-res and adds white space around the sides.

jslayton

Saving an image in FT will output the current view, including any leftover space around the edge of the image. To minimize this area, try to make the drawn area in FT square rather than rectangular and then save the image. If you want an image that's in the equirectangular projection without any border then use File>>Export World>>Sphere Map Image. The output will be at the resolution that you specify and will do the whole world in a form suitable for mapping to a sphere in your favorite 3D program. FT is a 32-bit program and so there is a practical upper limit on the size of images, of course. I was just able to do an 8192-sized sphere map export, by way of example, but 16384 will kill the program.

See http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/CGTutorial/index.html for an example of how to use the Image Climate shader to give workable results without the ice caps that show up in the Gaia view.

Zedarius

jslayton, thank you so much. That export is great. Have a few questions, though.

Following this tutorial, I'm stuck at two things that don't seem to be in the version of Fractal Terrains that I have. The "Incise Flow" step, and the "Image Climate Shader" step. Would you be able to expand on these at all? Also, is the smoothing of the rivers done in Photoshop? Anybody have any idea how it's done? They look ...normal, and not pixelated blue lines throughout the map.

jslayton

The Incise Flow command and the Image Climate shader were added in the 2.3 version of the software. If you don't have these commands then you need to go to the ProFantasy site and download the latest FT version.

For that image, the smoothing of the rivers happened automatically the image was downsampled. Export at a higher resolution than you want (two times is good, but 20% over is a good minimum) then use an image editing program such as Photoshop to reduce the image size. The other important thing to do is pick a good river color when generating rivers.