Fractal Terrains: fractal resolution when zooming in
Hi everyone,
Does anyone know if there's a way to increase the resolution of world maps when zooming in? For example, I have a world open in FT3, and I want to zoom in to be able to view part of the world at very small scale--say an area several miles across. However, at that scale all of the fractal granularity of the larger maps is lost, and the geographical features basically appear as straight lines and smooth curves, looking clearly not natural. I'd like to be able to dump a map view at that scale into CC3, or just as an image to photomanip, but at the moment the resolution is too low to be useful.
Am I missing a key setting which will let me do this? I'd've thought that given the settings are fractal, zooming in should be able to fractalise the view so there's no limit to have far you can zoom in.
Cheers,
Sarah
Does anyone know if there's a way to increase the resolution of world maps when zooming in? For example, I have a world open in FT3, and I want to zoom in to be able to view part of the world at very small scale--say an area several miles across. However, at that scale all of the fractal granularity of the larger maps is lost, and the geographical features basically appear as straight lines and smooth curves, looking clearly not natural. I'd like to be able to dump a map view at that scale into CC3, or just as an image to photomanip, but at the moment the resolution is too low to be useful.
Am I missing a key setting which will let me do this? I'd've thought that given the settings are fractal, zooming in should be able to fractalise the view so there's no limit to have far you can zoom in.
Cheers,
Sarah
Comments
There are practical numeric limitations to computer-generated fractals. For the original algorithms used in FT, it's about 13 octaves (which means that new detail stops being added on a scale of about the circumference divided by 2 to the 13th power or roughly 25000/8192=3 miles for a typical world). A different algorithm would give different results, but the default FT uses a fairly limited one.
You can force FT to generate additional octaves of noise by using Map>>World Settings, select the Fractal Function tab and then click the Parms button. You can then enter a larger value in the Octaves field, but you will likely see strange artifacts if you increase it beyond 12.
Different algorithms will have different failure points. For example, the Fractal Function Methods with "Perlin's Improved Noise" in their names will generally work well with many more octaves, but you will eventually hit other numeric limits in FT at around 0.001 miles per pixel. Pushing the number of octaves much above 26 octaves will just slow down processing because FT uses a constant number of octaves per evaluation. The problem with switching the fractal method is that it will generate a different world, even for the same parameters.