Photoshop to Fractal Terrain
aqbrooks
Newcomer
Hi all, Im a new user and am attempting to transfer a map that i have drawn on photoshop onto fractal terrain. The photoshop map is literally just some black lines filled with green on a blue background so i have no idea what to do to get that into fractal terrain.
I want to use fractal terrain to make use of the detail it gives its random maps especially to coastlines, terrain roughness and river feature. Also i want to be able to create height maps and draw the climates in
Any help would be greatly appreciated thanks
Comments
Hi aqbrooks :)
Do you have the Tome of Ultimate Mapping?
If you do, there is a whole section on FT3 that contains all the things you need to know, particularly around page 645. However, I would strongly recommend at least scan reading the rest of it, since it contains a lot of useful information on the basic way FT3 works.
There is also an issue in the 2019 Cartographer's Annual called The One Day Worldbuilder that might help.
In addition to these two things there are several blogs by various authors and a few Youtube tuts as well that might prove useful for picking up bits and pieces of information and handy techniques.
Both of these have to be paid for, i dont really want to invest more money if im not going to be able to do what i want? I have taught myself how to use Fractal Terrain but i want to import my blank map opposed to creating a random one
Start with a new flat world and import your bitmap as an image overlay. Depending on what the image is like you can then use it to make a selection to raise the land from the sea and sculpt it from there.
This isnt working because it is just generating weird unnatural coast lines, and drawing big lines instead of slowing increasing the coastline like it would on a random generated map
Please could you show me a screen shot of your map?
Thank you.
Is this your PS map?
This is my map that i made in illustrator and then transferred into photoshop yes
Ok.
First things first. If you want to make life a lot easier for yourself you need to crop that map so that it is twice as wide as it is tall. That is the proportion of the equirectangular projection that is the default projection for FT3. It is also the projection most commonly used to transfer world data between apps, or to provide it online.
Once you have done that you need to set up FT3 so that it is in a suitable state for sculpting a new world from scratch. Because you don't have any altitude data you will have to sculpt it by hand. But you can still use your bitmap as a guide to get the land shape right.
Create a new FT3 flat world as before and import your adjusted bitmap as an overlay
Open the World Settings dialog and go to the Editing tab.
Set the editing resolution to a reasonably high number (6000 should do), check the little box that says "Allow Prescale Offset Editing" Make sure you click the Apply button, or these changes will not be applied!
You will need to do a couple of things to the flat world to make it easier to sculpt. First you need to give the ocean some depth instead of it being uniformly at zero feet deep. Do this using Global Set -> Altitude Value from the Tools menu. Set the altitude to about -15,000 ft.
Then you will need some background roughness to be able to raise it with the prescale offset brushes you just activated by checking that little box above. Use Global Set -> Land Roughness Edit from the Tools menu, and set the value to about 0.3.
Now you are ready to start sculpting.
Show your image overlay, and using the Prescale Offset brushes only (increase the size of the brushes to cover a reasonable area and reduce the value to 0.001 or they will be too powerful to control) start to raise the land out of the sea and give it the hills and mountains you desire.
Great, i seem to be making some progress, however when i am attempting to edit with the raise tool it is nor behaving as it would on the randomly generated map (slowly increasing the coastline in a natural looking way) instead it is creating these weird outlying bumps (image below)
You're using a method I am not familiar with. Maybe someone who uses the colour to altitude thing can help better.
Color to Altitude is intended for use when you have a map that's composed of multiple solid-color contours representing altitudes. It's a quick way to convert the colors into altitude ranges. Because you have only two colors (land and sea), you probably don't want to use Color to Altitude. Looking closely at the provided map, it doesn't exactly have two colors. It has two similar groups of colors for land and sea (plus some smudges that look like brush overlaps), which will really confuse FT's color-to-altitude algorithm. I recommend converting the map to a solid-color operation (maybe black and white) if you can.
If you start as Sue suggested and increase your editing resolution and use prescale editing, that's a good beginning in FT3. You will definitely want to pick a projection for your map and determine where the equator and poles lie. If you bear with me, I'll use your posted map and show some things that you can do.
Start by taking the posted map into an image editor, crop off the black border, and convert the blue areas to black and the green areas to white. This technique looks just like a selection mask for the land, which is what we'll use it for. Because FT's selection feature is intended to work with BMP files, we also would want to flip it vertically. For now, we'll assume that your map is a stretched equirectangular projection centered on the equator. This assumption means that there will be some polar distortion in your map.
Now start FT3, adjust the editing resolution and prescale editing things as Sue suggested. Clear out any existing altitudes using Tools>>Global Set>>Land Roughness with a value of 0. To create some land, use Select>>Load Selection and load the black/white land mask as described above. You should see the outline of your continents.
Now for a little weird magic. Your selection has the solid-color outline, but you'd prefer to have something other than just a flat outline. The best way to do this is to roughly block in your mountains as white and the rest of the land as gray when you're drawing the world, but we don't have that. What we can do is have FT calculate how far it is from the coastlines to the center of the continents and increase the roughness (and altitude a little bit) by that. Select>>Modify>>Distance will do that calculation. The selection will look hopelessly mangled, but it's not that bad, honest! Anyhow, now do Tools>>Global Raise>>Land Roughness Edit with a value of 0.25. You should see some land in the general area. Try Tools>>Global Raise>>Prescale Land Offset with a value of 0.75 to push things up high in the mountain areas. There will probably still be some areas that aren't quite above sea level yet. The most effective way to get rid of those is probably to reload your original selection and manually paint in those area with the prescale offset painting tool.
If you can paint a mask with mountains blurrily blocked in where you want them, you can avoid the Distance steps on your selection and get mountains wherever you want them instead of just down the centers of your continents.
Zooming in along the edges of your costs will show the sorts of strange artifacts that you mentioned forming a ring around the continents. FT3 uses what's called bicubic interpolation to adapt your editing data to the currently-viewed resolution. Bicubic interpolation works in such a way that strong changes between the center pixels will generate little humps in the outer pixels. It's the tops of those little humps that you're seeing as artifacts because the humps are just over the sea surface in this case. A way to eliminate them is to push the sea level below 0.0 so that the hump never break the surface.
Load your original land mask selection and use Select>>Inverse to select the ocean instead. Use Tools>>Global Set>>Land Roughness Edit with a value of 0.01 to get some leverage on the prescale editing. You'll see all of those original continents from the original world appear, but they are nearly flat. Use Tools>>Global Set>>Prescale Land Offset with a value of -0.5 and they should all disappear along with most of the artifacts. If there are any problem areas, you should be able to quickly paint them out or deselect the use Tools>>Global Smooth>>Prescale Land Offset with a value of about 1.
Cropped and flipped mask version of your original mask:
And this is the Mercator projection version of the suggested process with some rivers.
As a more direct answer to the question about bumps, it's because of how FT interpolates your editing data. Select your sea area (perhaps using Image Overlays>>Color-to-Selection Tool), and globally lower it a bit. Feathering the selection a little before lowering Select>>Feather with a value of around 1.0) will smooth the edge of the selection, making the transitions less harsh. As you lower the sea, the humps should start to disappear. If you lower the sea too far or with too hard of a transition (no feathering), you'll start to see little humps appear on the land side of the boundary.