Unfractalize?

ScottA

Just curious, is there a way to unfractalize something? What I'm thinking, specifically, is the Fractalize command. I've Fractalized all the rivers on one of my maps and I'm not sure now if I like them that way or not. It really isn't much hassle to redraw them all if I decide to go back to smooth, but I was just curious if there was a command that would do it?

jslayton

REDN claims to offer that functionality.

Dogtag

For the uninitiated, REDN is the Remove Nodes command. You can use it by typing REDN in the command line or by right-clicking the Fractalise button, and then choosing Remove Nodes from the pop-up menu. Like Fractalise, you can use Remove Nodes multiple times to repeatedly adjust the number of nodes on the entity.

When you're done, however, you'll still have a straight entity (path, poly, etc). To make it smooth again, right-click the Fractalise button again and then select Straight to Smooth (STC on the command line) to convert the straight entity to a smooth one.

On the other hand, you can also make a fractalized entity smooth, without removing nodes. Personally, I think this often looks pretty good with rivers.

Incidentally, you can also right-click the Explode button; they both have the same pop-up menu.

Cheers,
~Dogtag

JimP

What i do is save as a series of flenames, before and after edits/add symbols, etc.

So I have a filename01_001, save it, fractalize. I don't like the results, load filename001_001, fractalize gone. Much faster than deleting lots of nodes.

I do have filename01_001 up to filename01_050, for lots of my maps, but it goes back further than undo. So it can be helpful.

jslayton

A minor word of warning with REDN: it doesn't exactly undo a FRX (fractalize) operation. What it does is to remove nodes when the angle between adjacent nodes is above a certain value. That means that it's quite possible to fractalize an entity (or draw a fractal entity with a drawing tool) and then have REDN be unable to get it close to its original shape.

ScottA

That worked a charm. I wasn't trying to "put things back" so much as really to take out some of the sharp angles I got on some of my rivers when I fractalized them. I left them mostly fractalized, but adjusted those that looked awful with sharp and boxy angles. Much better now! Thanks, again for the advice.