Export from Fractal Terrains 3.5 to QGIS?
I'm tryign to get my world that I generated way back in 2008 from Fractal Terrains into QGIS...I'm guessing DEM would be best of some sort, but I'm open to other options. I've tried another post I saw here that suggested saving a special MDR and opening it in Wilbur but the imported mdr in wilbur is just purple with no data. If I save a wilbur mdr from FT3 I get the surface, but it's got a band around it, which I don't know how to accurately crop to equirectangular. Overall I'm just curious what the best way to get my world into QGIS would be.
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In FT3, use File>>Save As with type "Raw Binary File". When the dialog comes up, enter your desired width (height will be half of that) and check the "16-bit Integer Output". The file written to the disk will be a Plate Caree (special case of Equirectangular) with no edges. The import into QGIS should be a simple raster layer with no header data, padding, or clipping required.
There is also a "Special MDR File" file type that's the same as above except for pixels are 32-bit floating point and there's a 1KB header at the top. This format is different from the "Wilbur MDR File" in that the "Special MDR File" is always whole-world Plate Caree, while "Wilbur MDR File" is the currently shown area for the map view, including projection, scaling, and any non-map data.
Ahh ok.. I saw a reply from you very similar to this in an older thread and I did try this but qgis wouldn't directly import it as a raster layer when I tried. The add layer dialog didn't present me with any import options when I selected the raw file so maybe I just need to dig a little deeper into the add layer or import process. Thanks!
Yeah I can't figure out how to directly import the raw data like that. If anyone else has ever imported raw data into a gis program is appreciate the help.
In FT3,
File>>Save As... and pick "special MDR" as the file type. Use 8192 (or whatever you want your width to be) and check the 16-bit integer checkbox. After some churning, you'll have a binary raster in the Plate Caree projection (1:1 lat:lon equirectangular) without any header or data, 16 bits per pixel, Intel byte ordering, width samples wide and width/2 samples high.
In Wilbur,
File>>New with width=8192, height=4096 (half the width); top=90, left=-180, right=180, bottom=-90
File>>Import>>Image Subsection. See image because there are too many parameters here because the image subsection tool does too many things at once.
File>>Save As with "HF2 Surface" as the type. There are potentially many types that will be usable, but I tested with HF2.
In QGIS (this may seem alien because I can't get you the experience of the QGIS help file that has the funny font coloring that suggests a link to follow, but appears to be purely decorative):
Ctrl+L to get the "Data Source Manager - Raster". You don't want to know how long and how many dead ends it took me to get the magic keystroke out of the help files.
Select the "File" radio button under "Source Type" and then click the "..." button for "Raster dataset(s)".
Pick your HF2 file saved from Wilbur, click Open, then click Add on the Data Source Manager.
Your data should be in QGIS. It may be upside down (flip in Wilbur before saving the HF2 is a simple fix) and it may not have the correct projection and it may not be particularly useful, but it technically is in QGIS.
Not a particularly elegant solution, but it might be enough to get you going. I'm not a QGIS user (obviously). Both FT3 and Wilbur do have "shove GDAL tooling into the code" on their list of tasks. but I have no idea when there might be newer versions of either available.