Fractal Terrains 3: How to set altitude (and temp) to a specific level
evildmguy
Newcomer
I'm creating my worlds in FT3 and I have questions. I have been looking through the Tome but can't find the answer.
I guess my question is this. How do I paint an area to a specified temperature? How do I paint an area to a specified altitude? Probably rainfall as well, if that can be done. (I haven't gotten to that yet.) My temperature map looks strange with hot dots and cold dots next to each other. If I can't put down a specific value, how do I change how fast it changes the altitude or temperature?
I want magical weather. I want to paint the temperature like I can the climate, which I really like the controls on that. I want all of the things to be painted like climate which seems to have some really good focus and control.
Does it refigure other things based on that or is that asking too much?
Thanks!
Jon
Comments
This question is fairly closely related to a recent question asked here: In FT3+, Can we import Climate map, Temperature map, Rainfall map and Altitude map ? — ProFantasy Community Forum but there are some differences in some of the details for painting in FT3+ as opposed to painting in an external application and importing those images. FT does offer a Global Set for the data channels (select an area you want to be at a specific value, then use Tools>>Global Set>>* Value [where * is the quantity of interest] to fill the area). Due to the nature of
To paint a world of precise altitude without the fractal detail, set the fractal channel to zero (Tools>>Global Set>>Land Roughness Edit with an Amount of 0). Then use Tools>>Paint Values>>Land Offset to begin painting altitudes. FT is a fairly clumsy paint program, though, so it's likely to get tedious quickly (and that's why we have selections...)
To paint a world of precise rainfall without the fractal detail, Use Tools>>Paint Values>>Rainfall.
It looks like the temperature things are broken at the moment, so getting solid results there may not be possible until a bug fix makes it out.
Thanks for the reply! I will try this.
What I'm attempting to do is put in my own world that I have already created into FT3. My thought was that it is easier to do it here and export it as CC3+ files plus I can edit biome, temps, rainfall, etc. Am I trying to use this tool in a way that it wasn't meant to be used?
In this case, I'm trying to create the islands my group made. This is a magical fantasy land. Each island might have its own weather patterns and another island might have different ones, even as it is at the same longitude or latitude. That's why I'm trying to paint them.
Is that not what was intended? Is it just to make a random world, true to the models in there, and with minimal changes?
Thanks!
Jon
The original spec for FT was a pure random world generator with export to Campaign Cartographer. My intent when building FT was to provide a randomized model that people can customize while also offering quite a few GIS application amenities like different projections, grids, image overlays, data import, and so on. My assumptions about the level of customization have (very recently) turned out to be not quite correct and there are some features that FT doesn't offer that have been on the wish list for a very long time (symbols in Campaign Cartographer export, better weather models, vector overlays, and so on) including some pretty esoteric features like sims of poor surveys (many early maps are accurate only in some very local area).
If your goal is to create a world map showing where many islands are in relationship to each other, FT can be a good (and bad) tool for that. FT's major failing is that it has a single editing resolution for the whole world. That's usually acceptable for medium scale work where individual islands are on the order of a few tens or hundreds of miles across (a few to a hundred pixels or so at 8190 editing resolution), but tends not to work well for very fine detail like islands that are just a few miles across (a single pixel doesn't give much detail). FT's next worse failing is that it doesn't really have a notion of seasons or of weather (it deals with simple annual averages and doesn't model oceanic or atmospheric movement or heat interchange).
The outputs from FT for terrain can be quite useful in showing size, distance, and direction on a broad scale map by using various map projections. However, each map exported will need its annotations redone from scratch. The kinds of things that are generally most interesting in maps like who is where (cities, trade routes, roads, countries, text labels) are not things that FT is particularly good at because those things tend not to be the sort of thing you can do easily on a simplistically clumsy paint program that warps things. Those things are precisely what Campaign Cartographer is good at, and FT can provide an excellent scaffold for getting consistent relationships of broad elements across various maps and those maps can then be elaborated in Campaign Cartographer.
My want for FT was always as an atlas-level map explorer that could allow editing of the explored areas and prepare stylized maps of the world under exploration. My tech base when I started the project 30 years ago was a relatively simple paint program and that tech base combined with my own lack of skills was enough to badly miss my own mark. Technology has marched on and I've gotten better at understanding what needs to happen, but it's increasingly hard to add things to an old pile of code.
If I didn't answer your question in the above rambling, please let me know. Some information about the kind of map that you're trying to make can also be helpful. For example, knowing that you want, say, ten areas that are a couple of hundred miles across suggests some ways to use FT that might not be obvious. How you want your final maps to look (for example, do you want a modern atlas-style thing or a pure fantasy map) will have a bearing on what kinds of tools you'd want to use in both FT and in CC3+.
I love the insight you give to FT. I didn't kmow it was that old.
Have used it for some serious imports. But most times just for fun.
Being 30 years old code, I can just imagine when you look at it, thinking, what the hell was I doing here. Especially if you didn't leave any internal notes on what each command was trying to accomplish.
That did help, @jslayton , thanks!
@Don Anderson Jr. Yep, I know looking at anything I did 30 years ago I wonder what the heck was I doing?
Thanks!
Jon