Fractal Terrains 3: Climate type views, Jungle and Marshes/Swamps

MountainGoat

Hello all,

I am wondering what climate type people consider jungle and marsh land? I am having a hard time visualizing what tropical deciduous is vs. tropical evergreen and so on.

Also, there are areas that i want to be cold marshes/swamps and I am not quite sure what to use for them.

What do you use for such areas?

Thank you for any help you can give!

JimP

Cold marshes would be Canada or Scndanavia ( Norway, Sweden, etc. ) in the warmer temperatures. So, Remy will be back in a few days so he will be more accurate than me, but muskeg, pine/fir trees, etc for cold area marshes.

Warm areas, well it depends on which jungle/equator area you look at.

Indonesia, Central America, Brazil rain forest, etc.

MountainGoat

Yeah those are more or less the areas that I'm thinking of, I'm more asking what that would translate to in terms of Fractal Terrain's climate types if that makes sense. I want to create an area of cold marshes but im not sure what that would look like as far as Fractal Terrains is concerned.

JimP

Joe would know more about that than me.

I use FT3 to make planets, export the png, and use those as guides to draw my own areas in CC3/CC3Plus.

jslayton

The climate graph in FT is approximately the Whittaker biome graph. https://w3.marietta.edu/~biol/biomes/biome_main.htm has an Earth map that shows the biome types and the base diagram. If you compare this latter image to the FT Image Climate diagram, you'll immediately notice that (a) it's rotated 180 degrees, (b) the FT diagram is much chunkier, and (c) the FT diagram extends all of the way to the edges of a rectangular box. One of the main goals with the FT lookup table was keeping it fairly small to reduce memory usage and keep it fast to look up things; this small size makes the boundaries much more pixelated than they would be in a better diagram.

A fun and instructive task is to take that Whittaker diagram and use an image editing program to rotate it, then clip it to fit into FT's Image Climate shader box. Then use that image in FT's Image Climate shader and you'll see the full glory of FT's climate model rendered using the standard biome map rather than the chunky one used in FT's Climate shader.