Exporting Rivers from Fractal Terrains
nascenticity
Newcomer
I have recently started exploring how to export my maps from Fractal Terrains to CC3, however, I've noticed that the one thing that's not contained in the exports from Fractal Terrains is the rivers overlay. I've tried looking thru the settings with no luck - I did manage to figure out how to export the rivers overlay as a png, but dropping this into CC3 gave me (what I believe to be) a raster layer I can't modify in any way, let alone align properly with the rest of my map.
Any tips on how to get the rivers I've (somewhat painstakingly) generated in Fractal Terrains to export properly into Campaing Cartographer is appreciated - workarounds included if there isn't an easy fix.
Comments
Hi Nascenticity :)
It's a little early here in the UK, and I've only just woken up, but I believe the rivers should export as vector entities if you have them visible at the time of export. There may be more to it than that, like the export settings, but I am sure that someone who has been awake just a little longer than I have right now (10 minutes I think) will help to correct me soon.
That's what I'd assumed too, but even with the rivers visible when I export, they still aren't being included.
My other thought was that maybe my map is too high resolution so some stuff is being left out of the export - but reducing the resolution doesn't seem to resolve the issue either.
When finding rivers in FT3, note that it can generate a raster flow image and/or a vector flow overlay. The raster flow image is calculated during the initial river finding stage and is usually discarded after vector rivers are found. The only way to keep the raster flow map is to check the "Keep River Image Overlay" checkbox on the "Select River Length" dialog stage of Tools>>Rivers>>Find Rivers. You can tell if you've kept the rivers image overlay by using Image Overlays>>Hide All Overlays; if rivers disappear on your FT map, then you're looking at the raster overlay, which is generally not helpful for CC3 export. I do not recommend keeping the raster overlay for general use.
To see the vector river overlays, make sure that the Tools>>Rivers>>Show River Overlays menu item is checked. You should see the vector river overlay that will be exported to CC3. If you don't see the vector river overlay, you may have been bitten by a bug in FT3 that sometimes fails to route vector rivers correctly. You can often work around this bug by slightly changing the River Definition Resolution to custom and changing the value to something very slightly different than the original value. For example, If you had selected "Very Fine" as the river resolution, the system would have selected 3072 as the world resolution for routing rivers. Changing this value to 3071 may fix the issue. In extreme cases, you might need to try a couple of different values around the desired river routing resolution.
This definitely gives me a better idea of what is going on - without checking the box that keeps the raster overlay, I never see any rivers after the "find rivers" operation. Unfortunately changing the resolution value doesn't seem to be helping - I've tried a few different values around the default and so far the vector rivers just disappear like always.
By any chance do you have land across the -180/+180 seam that would have rivers crossing it?
Also, are you running the 3.0.21 update?
I do have land crossing the edge of the map, and I don't think I'm running the update currently.