FT3: Adding land at the poles

Does anyone know a good technique or know of a tutorial for adding land at the poles in FT3? When I try to do it with a paintbrush, I get something that looks like it could be a flower made by squeezing cake frosting out of a bag.

Comments

  • LoopysueLoopysue ProFantasy 🖼️ 40 images Cartographer
    I'm sure there must be one, but for now I have a head full of overland symbols (not literally, of course, but my mind is focussed elsewhere right now)

    I would think it might involve changing the projection and rotating the world by numbers (not with the globe widget).

    Maybe Joe knows a way?
  • jslaytonjslayton Moderator, ProFantasy Mapmaker
    For performance reasons way back when, FT always paints into the Equirectangular map (brushes have the correct shape in that projection, but are distorted in other projections). Projecting the screen-space shape of the brush back onto the world was unreasonably slow, meaning that painting wasn't an interactive experience.
    The simplest way to get things at the poles is to select the shape of your landmass or mountain ranges and fill that area.
    A more cumbersome way to get polar detail is to paint height detail onto a polar projection using a paint program, reproject that image into Equirectangular, and then import that into FT (maybe as a selection). Ralf's Jhendor map in FT used this sort of technique ( http://www.jhendor.de/tutorials/cc2-ft.pdf - note that the ReprojectImage program has moved to http://www.fracterra.com/ReprojectImage.zip if you're reading his PDF).
  • Joe/Sue,

    Thank you both! After reading what Joe said about the brushes and projections, I've been playing around. If I use a brush that is twice as wide as it is high, I get less of the elongated look when I switch from equirectangular to orthographic, so that's better.

    When selecting and filling an area to create land, would that be using something like global raise or global set for altitude and then maybe adding some roughness or something?
  • jslaytonjslayton Moderator, ProFantasy Mapmaker
    Use global raise in the land offset channel to raise land in the area of the selection and global raise roughness to make those areas rougher if desired.
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