FT3 Paintbrush width, Freehand Selection, drawing a river issue

dmjung

I'm trying to draw in some river segments to drain some lakes to the ocean with my FT3 world.

My first attempt was to use the Lower altitude paintbrush, but the brush width is grossly wide for what I need. Did not see a way to dial it down beyond the minimum of 1 which still paints in large lake-like areas.

My second attempt was to use the Freehand selection. Unfortunately, as I zoom in the ability of the freehand selection to accurately match what I choose goes nuts. I assume this is related to the Editing Size which I have set as a custom of 4096.

Is there a better way to do this? Like a Freehand Draw River command? :)

Thanks.

--David

Terraformer_Author

You can access your tools options window by going to "View" > "Toolbars And Docking Windows" > "Tool Options - where you can customize your brush size and the "effect impact" of the brush through the "Values" dialogue window. You might try increasing the brush value when raising / lowering terrain - or when making a specific area wetter? I would also refer you to this tutorial by Joe Slayton:

http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/CGTutorial/

Terraformer_Author

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http://forum.profantasy.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=2182

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http://forum.profantasy.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=486

dmjung

The Tool options only allows a minimum width and height of 1. Even trying to be extra careful, I end up with river widths of 2 to 5 miles wide or even wider.

My initial tinkering with Incise Flow wasn't useful, but I'll do some more playing there.

--David

jslayton

FT3 doesn't allow drawing in rivers directly, sorry. The best that you can do is to edit the terrain to form a valley where the river can flow, and that editing will be subject to whatever your world size and editing resolution settings are.

dmjung

Thanks. The help file mentions part of this approach in passing which seems to be working for me...

(Fill basins first.)
Run the rivers tool.
Locate rivers captured by a lake.
Raise the lake.
Rerun the rivers tool.
Cycle back to looking for captured rivers again.

If this sounds like the best/reasonable approach, perhaps explicitly document as a help topic rather then buried in a paragraph.

I suppose you could automate this in some manner until the river hits the "ocean" and then optionally go back and lower the lakes to their original depth. heh. :)

Just curious, would it be feasible to run part of your river placement computations in reverse starting at the coast and working backwards to the high point?

--David