River Channels with FT3+
jbclaypool
Newcomer
Is it possible to edit the River Channels overlay in FT3+ to add additional river channels?
jbclaypool
Newcomer
Is it possible to edit the River Channels overlay in FT3+ to add additional river channels?
Comments
Yes, but it's easier if you export the map to CC3 and edit them as vectors.
If you are exporting the map direct from FT3 and not using CC3 at all, and the problem is that you ran Rind Rivers with settings that didn't give you what you wanted, you can Clear Rivers, and/or Delete River Overlay and try Find Rivers again with longer rivers at a higher resolution (resolution is controlled by increasing the Editing resolution in the World Settings). It's much faster than hand editing.
To get an editable raster image river overlay you need to check the 'Keep River Overlay' box when you initiate the Find Rivers tool, and then open the overlay window and make it both visible and active.
Yeah, I originally ran with an editing resolution of 16000 in World Settings, longest rivers at 12000 river resolution. I can go as high as 32000 on World Settings but in general no commands work: 16000 is the highest I can go and get command to work. Are you talking about setting the Rivers overlay as a simple create?
Mostly, what I'm doing here is pushing the software to see what the practical limits are with FT3+, will ultimately export the maps to CC3+ or something else, but want to learn what is doable with FT3+ first.
Create rivers in the normal way (Tools->Find Rivers) and tick the checkbox called 'Keep River Image Overlay' on the dialog that opens once the rivers have been calculated.
Once they are done, you can show the generated river overlay and edit it. This is not the same thing as the vector rivers already visible on the map.
And the only way to find the limits is by trying them ;)
I recommend running through the One Day Worldbuilder, which is included with FT3. That will allow you to take the FT3 world to a free app called Wilbur and bring it back to FT3 with decent river channels nicely eroded in the land. Otherwise you will probably end up with a mass of rivers so dense that the whole map is blue. This is what happened to me when I tried pushing everything to the absolute limits just now. I would say that is down to the lack of suitable channels.
Thanks, I've been going back and forth from FT3+ to Wilbur. The final return to FT3 shows Wilbur channels on the map that don't end up with rivers. So I'm trying to get those in before I transfer to CC3 or something else.
That doesn't sound right.
Have you run Tools->Actions->Burn into surface?
It's a while since I wrote ODW, but I think this is necessary before you can do rivers well.
There are a lot of things that won't match when comparing the Wilbur rivers with the FT rivers. Having a river calculation resolution in FT that's smaller than your import resolution from Wilbur will always cause loss of channels due to resampling the height data. If you find rivers in Wilbur and compare them to the rivers in FT, you will likely find some differences. These differences happen (even at the same resolution) because FT changes the surface by doing things like filling basins to make sure that rivers go a plausibly long distance before trying to find rivers.
An important consideration is that the practical limits in FT3 and the practical limits in CC3 will be quite a bit different. FT has always been able to generate more data than CC3 can reasonably handle, especially if you multipoly the contours.
Thanks Sue & Joe,
I'm attaching a picture of one region of the world that has the FT3 rivers in blue and the Wilbur rivers in white dotted lines. So how do I draw in the additional Wilbur rivers on the the overlay?
There are a few things you can try:
When importing back into FT from Wilbur using an MDR file, don't use "Burn In To Surface" in FT. You'll need to keep the binary file around, but you won't lose any precision due to the normal bicubic interpolation that FT performs on the editing channel. You'll get nearest neighbor interpolation, which is what Wilbur does.
If you want to keep the data in an ftw file, then go ahead and use "Burn In To Surface" in FT, but also check the "Raw Height Field" checkbox on the "Secondary" page of the "World Settings" property sheet. You'll lose access to the roughness and prescale editing operations, but you normally wouldn't use those with a binary import anyhow. The "Raw Height Field" checkbox tells FT to use bilinear interpolation when fetching offsets rather than the normal bicubic interpolation.
When calculating the rivers, make sure that the river size is the same as the editing surface size (what you imported). If it's not the same size, then FT will miss the little narrow canyons when routing rivers. If you're not using an oversized input surface, then calculating the rivers at slightly higher resolution than the editing data will make sure you don't miss too many narrow canyons and your rivers will probably look a bit better.
If you just want a river image overlay to match the one in Wilbur (that is, don't care about the vector rivers for export to CC3), save the texture image from Wilbur and import it to FT as an image overlay. If you want the vector river information for CC3 export, you'll need to try some of the suggestions above. I recommend trying with a lower-resolution world to get a feel for the process before working on a super-high resolution image and waiting a long time between each step.
Thanks Joe,
I'll give these things a try. If I end up using Wilbur rivers as an overlay, is there a way in Wilbur to have a transparent background for the png texture? Or do I need to do a solid background and then transform it somehow with Gimp?
I appreciate you guys answering my questions. I've played around with a lot of mapping software (FT3, CC3, Fractal Mapper, World Machine, World Creator, etc.), but I always come back to FT3. I just enjoy messing with it. So appreciate all your work on it.
When you create the river overlay in Wilbur, be sure to check the "Use Solid Background Color" checkbox. Save the texture in Wilbur, then when you import your image overlay in FT, FT will ask you if you want to use the upper-left color as the transparent color. Statistically speaking, answering "Yes" will get you the solid background as transparent. I say "statistically", because there's always a (small) chance that a river will have run exactly through the 0,0 pixel.
Ok. Was trying to re-open some regional MDR files in Wilbur that I imported into FT3 and Wilbur says there is an error. MDR files that have not been imported into FT3 are fine.
I apologize if questions about Wilbur should be taken to Joe's website or Cartographers Guild.
This place is as good as any other for Wilbur questions.
Return code -2 from the MDR reader means that Wilbur couldn't open the file for reading. Is the file still open in FT?
The second error message is the generic message and doesn't mean anything useful.
How large is the mdr file?
They are all 514.314 Mb
Ok, Wilbur started opening the files. Computer has restarted to run Windows updates a few times--I'm blaming it on some sort of update interference. As I mentioned previously, any MDR file that I had imported into FT3 would not open, if it hadn't been imported, it opened fine. But there all opening now.🙄
A restart was going to be my next suggestion. Very rarely, FT won't exit cleanly and leaves behind a zombie process for a few minutes after hiding the GUI. That process would hold onto any open files and prevent other programs (like Wilbur) from opening them. It's fairly uncommon, like I said, but a restart will always guarantee that nobody is playing with the files.