Move Land Mass/Shift all Land
Complete and utter newbie here. I tried a couple of form searches and nothing came up. I'm working in FT3, and I'm wondering if there's a way to move entire land masses, or to, in essence, shift some/all of the land masses on the globe? Hopefully that makes sense. I see some Selection Tools, but in digging around, I'm not finding anything that would let me select land and then move it elsewhere. Or a global "shift all land to the north/south/east/west." Is there such a beast?
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Copying and pasting portions of the world isn't supported in FT3; its selections are for controlling where operations like raise and lower take effect.
Now, if I could only figure out how I managed to turn on the underwater terrain (don't get me wrong, I rather like it, as it is letting me start to think about ancient cataclysms and such, but it would be nice to know how I did it), and why none of my worlds seem to have extensive biodiversity - at least by FT3 standards. I get a lot of Temperate Forest, slightly less Tropical Deciduous Forest, Boreal/Alpine Forest, and then Taiga/Tundra/Ice, and not much else. I occasionally get smidges of Tropical Shrublands, but see almost none of the rest of the FT3 biomes. At first I thought maybe it was just because they were smaller environs, and zooming in, I'd find them. But no luck.
The biodiversity issue could be due to any number of things. Try adjusting the Temperature and Rainfall values on the World Settings property page. The "Specify Base Temperature" controls are easier to use than the physically-based Base Temperature, in my opinion. http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/climateinfo.gif shows the basic table that FT uses for selecting the climate type from rainfall and temperature. http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/CGTutorial/index.html shows how to use FT's tools for painting world information and a short example of the Image Climate shader.
Hmmmm - I hadn't played around much with the temperature and rainfall settings - I wasn't sure how best to adjust them without borking things, so I was working with the defaults. It doesn't help that I'm woefully ignorant of mean temperatures and rainfall for Earth, and it looks like you can only make adjustments globally? I tried "painting" climates on a test map, and didn't like the results at all. It looked very fake. I'm at work at the moment, but I'll take a look at your tutorial when I get home this afternoon and give it a try!
The other thing that's kinda bugging me is that when I start raising/lowering the prescale offset, the tool is sadly not irregular, so eventually if I'm working in one area enough, the landscape starts to look at bit TOO regular. Also - the Smooth tool (not the Global smooth, the other one) didn't seem to be working - is that likely because I didn't have it set to a high enough value? I want to smooth out the lower altitude areas without ruining the mountainous areas, which is why I stopped using the Global Smooth, but maybe I should just keep using it?
Thanks so much for the advice and helpful instructions!
The painting tools are based around a nice smooth shape. You can load an image to replace the brush, though. Select a painting tool and then click the "C" button on the Paintbrush Options toolbar to bring up the Edit Paintbrush Settings dialog. Set Form to "Image" and click the "..." button next to File on the Image Brush section of the dialog. Select an image that you'd like to work with and click OK, then OK again to dismiss the Edit Paintbrush Settings dialog. Then all of your painting with that tool will be using the shape that you selected.
If you want to smooth just an altitude range, consider selecting just that altitude range using Select>>Altitude Range before using tools. The tools will only take effect on the selected area. I recommend using a Select>>Feather operation after the initial selection to smooth out the edges of the data. Note that the smooth tools only work on values that you've painted or applied globally, so if you'd like to smooth out the fractal things in just the lower altitude, you will need to use Global Lower>>Land Roughness first.
I haven't looked at that item in some years so I'm afraid I can't say much about it.
> Like the Continental Shelf - is there a reason it's set to -999.999 feet? What happens when you change it?
-1000 feet was an arbitrary value that looked about right (the -999.999 value is roundoff error as often occurs in floating-point operations). A value of -460 feet or thereabouts is probably more physically accurate if you want Earth, but that setting gives narrower continental shelves that look a bit skimpy with FT's basic fractal altitude model. Changing the value changes the depth at which the continental break (the drop off from continental shelf to continental slope) occurs.
> Or what's the difference between "Earth" and "Fantasy World" in the Selection Tab?
I would guess that it's the world settings for each type of setting. I didn't do those settings files, so I'm not sure what's in them. You can always start a new world and try applying the various settings.
> Or "Raw Height Field" - what is that?
A height field is effectively a picture with each pixel treated as a height value. Height fields form that basis of FT's editing features (offset, prescale offset, roughness, rainfall edit, temperature edit, and forced climate values are all stored as height fields over the whole world). FT normally mixes the offset, prescale offset, and roughness height fields together with a fractal function to generate the final altitude. Setting "Raw Height Field" will cause FT to ignore the prescale offset, roughness and height fields fractal function altogether and get the altitude straight from the offset channel. It's a mode that most users probably wouldn't want to use because it makes FT ignore many of its most interesting features.
During the computation process, FT computes an image overlay representing the river flow. It then scans this image to find the vector rivers that can be exported to CC3. If you would like to keep the intermediate image, check the "Keep River Image Overlay" checkbox. It won't hurt anything, but it will show you exactly what FT used to compute its vector rivers.
Also, when I tried changing the Sea Level color - it changed the colors of two of the other levels as well - and what's worse, the color I chose for the river wasn't an option anywhere, so now when I run the rivers again, I'm going to have to try and choose the right color for sea level?
FT's altitude color pickers for land and sea have a patch of color above the gradient area and a path of color below the gradient. Changing the color of the patch above or below the gradient will recompute the whole gradient. Clicking on the gradient will edit just on color on the gradient.
One semi-hidden feature in FT is that holding down the Shift key when clicking on a color patch will bring up the Windows RGB color picker rather than CC3-style palette color picker. That way you can specify the exact color that you want, even if it's not on the standard 256 colors.
Hmmm - what happens when you import into CC3? What happens to those lines? Are you able to manipulate them or delete, to draw an actual river?
Whoops, further back than I thought. Making a river with varying widths?
OMG, I'm in trouble. That entire thread might as well have been written in Swahili, for all that I understood
1. In CC3, there is this ugly grid, but I had no grid enabled in FT3 when I did the export. Is there a way to turn this off?
2. Every freaking map has this "FULLY MONTY" label in CC3. Is there a way to turn this off/delete it? Something?
3. Is there a way to move/make smaller/change the scale and compass rose? They aren't the prettiest, and they are also in awful places on the maps.
4. Is there a way to switch back and forth between symbol sets? so that you can mix and match symbols from various sets on one map?
1. Yep, it's an actual grid - vertical and horizontal lines.
2. Alas, I'm not sure what you mean by "edit entry" - I need to go back and re-watch Joseph's tutorials I guess. I assumed they were on their own layer, but when I right-click on layers, the only layer that has a check mark on it is Map Border. Everything else is blank, so I'm wondering if something went wrong, and it didn't create different layers for things?
3. I looked when I did the Export, and I didn't see any option to turn those things off. I know when I watched Joseph's tutorial, if you did a "Save As CC" with an FT3 file, you got those sorts of options, but I couldn't see any way to get to them with the multiple export option.
4. I've got a bunch of catalogs (bought the Fantasy Symbol Set, and one of the annuals) - but what I can't seem to be smart enough to figure out is how to switch back and forth between them.
Above your list of symbols on the left side of your CC3 screen (below the "Options..." button) are two buttons. The one on the right that looks like a file folder putting something onto a vertical list that looks a lot like the list of symbols below it will open a symbol catalog.
The white blotches are what happens when the lowest contour in a CC3 setting file (such as Full Monty) isn't at or below the lowest altitude value. The lowest parts of the world aren't represented in the CC3 file and the background color is showing through. When you're editing the Full Monty export settings file, try adding another contour at -40000 on the Advanced Contour Settings to catch any lower parts.