FT and Wilbur

Douglas_Anders

I've begun working through the helpful Israh tutorial, but it left me wondering: what does Wilbur do better than FT3? The results in a case of Isha are remarkable and now I'm wondering if I should always pass my work through Wilbur, or is this something of an edge case?

jslayton

The biggest difference between FT and Wilbur is that in Wilbur, you specify a resolution in which all work will occur; in FT, you specify an editing resolution that is largely divorced from any of the operations. This difference is most apparent in operations that require a particular resolution to work properly such as river routing, basin fills, and altitude sets. You may have noticed that in FT, rivers can be a little divorced from the underlying terrain, while basin fills and altitude sets can be a bit rough.

FT can force the terrain to your editing resolution (Tools>>Actions>>Burn In To Surface), but it's likely that you'll lose a lot of detail this way. However, the erosion and river tools in FT will then match very well with the terrain.

The one toy that Wilbur has that many folks seem to like is the precipiton (yes, that's precipiton, not precipitation) erosion tool. It pulls down terrain along the flow paths in a manner quite different than the incise flow found in both FT and Wilbur tools does. The results are quite a bit different as can be seen in http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/FunWithWilburVol1/index.html (it's a Wilbur tutorial, but the tools are the same between FT and WIlbur except for the precipiton tool at the end).

The 64-bit version of Wilbur can handle much larger surfaces than FT's editing tools, meaning that you can get higher details from a lower-resolution FT input.