Smooth brush not working as expected

I have an area of land I'd like to flatten into a floodplain, but the smooth brush doesn't seem to smooth anything. Rather, it acts more like an aggressive version of the lower terrain brush. Likewise, the roughen brush doesn't so much roughen terrain as it does dramatically and uniformly raise the height under the brush. Am I using these tools incorrectly? How can I achieve the desired effect?

Comments

  • jslaytonjslayton Moderator, ProFantasy Mapmaker
    The smoother and rougher brushes in FT are actually painting scaling factors for the fractal function (smoother yields a smaller scale, while rougher gives a larger scale). What you're showing is what happens when you edit things in the offset channel and then try to use smoother or rougher: the underlying fractal part of the world comes through and overwhelms your offset editing. For best results, rougher and smoother should be used before any offset adjustments are made.

    The characteristics of the area that you're showing suggests that you might have used the set altitude tool to do this work. This tool calculates the world altitudes and then sets the difference between the world altitude and the desired altitude into the offset channel. This operation unfortunately leaves a lot of noise in the result. You can often smooth out this noise by selecting an area to work on and using the Global Blur operation.
  • 1 year later
  • <blockquote><cite>Posted By: RetailPleb</cite>I have an area of land I'd like to flatten into a floodplain, but the smooth brush doesn't seem to smooth anything. Rather, it acts more like an aggressive version of the lower terrain brush. Likewise, the roughen brush doesn't so much roughen terrain as it does dramatically and uniformly raise the height under the brush. Am I using these tools incorrectly? How can I achieve the desired effect?</blockquote>

    I know this is thread necromancy but I'm having the exact same problem. These tools are very badly designed or I don't understand how to properly use them. I simply want to roughen and smooth areas without raising or lowering the entire "brush" area. I cannot figure this problem out.
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