Fractal Terrains - just starting out, looking for help with altitude and selection tools
Just downloaded the demo of FT earlier tonight and started playing around with it. At some point, whenever I get back to building up my fantasy world (a seemingly never-ending project), I might try to use it toward that purpose, creating the entire fictional world, but for the moment, I mainly wanted to see if it might be useful for another idea: creating a fictional city in a fictional US state, but otherwise set in the real world. So, what I'd like to do is take the existing US map, and just add some landmass to it. Not add a new landmass NEAR it, but take the current "edge" of the continent (up in the pacific northwest, specifically), and stretch it out, as well as make some changes to other bits of coastline nearby. And I can't see how to do this in FT. The "raise terrain" tool alternates between doing two things. One, it raises the terrain over a HUGE area. I make the selector for the tool as small as is possible as far as I can tell (which is still not that small, actually), and when I actually use the tool, it raises terrain over an area MUCH larger than that dotted-line selection indicator was covering. It does it all in a very flat fashion, too, changing blue ocean to green flatlands, but with NO texture/mountains/etc. Or, thing number two that this tool does: absolutely nothing. I click and/or drag over an area, and the map does that "fade out/fade in" thing when it's re-drawing, but nothing actually changes. I see additional tools - to raise and lower the "prescale offset" - but I didn't see an explanation of what that means in the Essentials guide, and those tools are grayed out anyway. So A) what are they for, and 
how do I enable them? And of course, C) IS there even a way to effectively "edit" the shape/size of an existing landmass in the manner I've described in FT, or should I just give up on the idea?
The selection tools also have me stumped. Is there a minimum size that can be selected? If the area I try to select is below a certain size, it just doesn't actually make the selection. And even if it does, it's never actually where I drew. I make a circle-ish shape that I want to select, and it selects a similarly shaped area down to the left (or in whatever direction, it's not always left of course) of where I drew. Am I missing something in the settings or some such?
Ultimately, what I want to do is this: take an area of the pacific northwest, stretch the land out and make a few changes to accommodate my fictional state, and maybe export that into CC3 to add city names, etc. (unless such labeling and detailing can be done IN FT itself...?). Then, I'd go back to FT, zero in on what would be the metropolitan area around my main city, and export a map of that zoomed-in area to CC3 to map out the actual city using one of the "modern map" style packs that were in the Annuals (I think there were two different modern map styles, one in 2011 and one in some other year?).
That last part, I could of course do on its own: forget FT, just get the Annual and start mapping the city in CC3. But I thought it would be interesting to define the area of the whole fictional state, as well as map the city on top of the pre-defined landmass that it is supposed to occupy, so I figured it was time to check out FT... but as you can tell from reading this, I'm kind of in over my head with it, haha.
Also, instead of making a separate thread, one question about the annuals while I'm here: does the 14-day trial/money back guarantee for ProFantasy's products apply to them as well? I ask because - correct me if I'm wrong - there is no way to buy JUST, say, the modern map style from 2011. I have to buy the entire Annual for $40. So, that being the case, I'd like to know whether or not I could take the styles in the Annual for a test drive before committing.
Finally, one last item: a very weird bit of behavior I wanted to report. Once, when opening FT, it opened one-hundred twenty-seven instances of itself. Needless to say, my computer had a bit of trouble running properly while opening these (though it didn't crash! I was actually able to shut them all down). I have NO idea what caused it, all I did was open the program. It only happened the one time, but I wanted to report on it anyway, just in case.
Thanks in advance for any assistance!
how do I enable them? And of course, C) IS there even a way to effectively "edit" the shape/size of an existing landmass in the manner I've described in FT, or should I just give up on the idea? The selection tools also have me stumped. Is there a minimum size that can be selected? If the area I try to select is below a certain size, it just doesn't actually make the selection. And even if it does, it's never actually where I drew. I make a circle-ish shape that I want to select, and it selects a similarly shaped area down to the left (or in whatever direction, it's not always left of course) of where I drew. Am I missing something in the settings or some such?
Ultimately, what I want to do is this: take an area of the pacific northwest, stretch the land out and make a few changes to accommodate my fictional state, and maybe export that into CC3 to add city names, etc. (unless such labeling and detailing can be done IN FT itself...?). Then, I'd go back to FT, zero in on what would be the metropolitan area around my main city, and export a map of that zoomed-in area to CC3 to map out the actual city using one of the "modern map" style packs that were in the Annuals (I think there were two different modern map styles, one in 2011 and one in some other year?).
That last part, I could of course do on its own: forget FT, just get the Annual and start mapping the city in CC3. But I thought it would be interesting to define the area of the whole fictional state, as well as map the city on top of the pre-defined landmass that it is supposed to occupy, so I figured it was time to check out FT... but as you can tell from reading this, I'm kind of in over my head with it, haha.
Also, instead of making a separate thread, one question about the annuals while I'm here: does the 14-day trial/money back guarantee for ProFantasy's products apply to them as well? I ask because - correct me if I'm wrong - there is no way to buy JUST, say, the modern map style from 2011. I have to buy the entire Annual for $40. So, that being the case, I'd like to know whether or not I could take the styles in the Annual for a test drive before committing.
Finally, one last item: a very weird bit of behavior I wanted to report. Once, when opening FT, it opened one-hundred twenty-seven instances of itself. Needless to say, my computer had a bit of trouble running properly while opening these (though it didn't crash! I was actually able to shut them all down). I have NO idea what caused it, all I did was open the program. It only happened the one time, but I wanted to report on it anyway, just in case.
Thanks in advance for any assistance!
Comments
EDIT: The only tutorials I've been able to find are mainly about random fantasy world generation, and exporting to CC3, not about doing alterations to an already made map.
Yes, the 14-day satisfaction guarantee applies to the Annual as well of course.
Terraformer, I figured the people here wouldn't let me down ultimately, haha. Never have before. I mainly bumped my thread cause it had been long enough that I didn't want it to just disappear off the first page.
Hmm... I see how changing the res enables me to edit smaller pieces of the world. However, there is a change that is common to both the edits I make (i.e. the section raised when I use the "Raise" tool to turn ocean into land), and the appearance of the entire map after using "Burn in to surface". The nicely textured look is gone, replaced by this really odd-looking, blobbish, pixelated look.
i.e. instead of this:
http://i.imgur.com/QUPPm.jpg
it looks like this:
http://i.imgur.com/JipgR.jpg
The entire map changes to that if I use burn-in, and the sections I raise look like that if I simply raise them without using burn-in on the whole map first. So basically, I guess I want to know if it's realistically possible to:
A) Make edits to a real-world pacific northwest coast, stretching out the landmass and making other alterations to accommodate a fictional state, while:
Note that using the "USTopo30" terrain data included with the program (specifically, choosing "New", "Binary File", and selecting that file) is the ONLY method that I am aware of for using a real US map as a base. I am certainly not set on the method, only the results. If there is another, superior and/or easier, method to accomplish my A and B above, then by all means, I'd love to hear about it!
I know I have a lot of questions, but I just want to be sure about my decision either way (either to buy it or to determine that it just isn't going to do what I want it to do). Whenever you (or anyone!) gets a chance, it's very much appreciated! And thanks for the answer on the Annuals; I figured that would be the case, but wanted to be sure rather than just assume. This way, at least I know I can get those styles and try them out making my city anytime, whether or not I continue using FT.
At that point, FT would be useful for conversion of that raster heightfield to CC3, but I think that for best value, you'd probably be better off just doing the map in CC3 from scratch and not using FT. http://geography.unt.edu/~maxey/3100USCanada/pdfs/Chapter2_Physical Features.pdf shows some useful styles for dealing with continental-level items; I'm partial to the Raisz "Landforms of North America" map at the top of that page.