Fixing glitches in ocean floor.
jbclaypool
Traveler
I'm working on a map of a world in FT and have done repeated editing on it. For a while every edit was causing voids on the west side and sometimes on the east side. I would do normalize data but that still left the ocean floor messed up. I finally settled on just depicting the oceans with a single color, no texture. But I would really like to fix it. A few times land actually popped up in rectangular sections after normalizing data, so I just used a rectangular selection and lowered the land offset. But this isn't pretty at all. I've tried selecting everything 2000ft below sea level and increasing roughness, but to no avail.
Is there any way to get the ocean floor to "reset" without messing up my land? I have too much invested in the land at this point to start completely over and I really think the same type of thing will happen.
Comments
Not sure if you have Annual 155/Cartographer's annual 2019.
It talks about one day world builder. I saw some text about exporting to wilbur and leveling up stuff.
This may be the route you need to fix it.
You can always import the FT file to CC3+ and see if that problem exists in CC3. Or if it does, bow easy is it to delete or change in CC3.
It won't harm anything exporting it to CC3
Yeah, I have ODWB, but the problem persists in CC3+. I don't have the artistic ability to paint the ocean in a way that blends in properly. I can turn off the ocean texture and use one color for the ocean, but even with that sometimes the glitches come through when exporting to jpeg.
Do you have a picture of some of the problem areas that you're willing to share? There may be options without going for a worldwide undersea apocalypse.
If you're trying to modify only the ocean areas, use Select>>Altitude range and "below" the number 0. That picks everything below 0, which should be water. If you've changed the sea level, use that value instead of 0. Note that this operation will not pick any lakes you may have emplaced, but it sounds like that's completely acceptable.
Because you don't want to get too close to the coastlines due to how FT interpolates data, you want to shrink the ocean selection a little bit. Use Select>>Modify>>Contract with a value of 5. Probably best to smooth out any transitions as well, so use Select>>Feather with a value of 1 to ease the edges of that selection.
At this point, you can try Tools>>Global Smooth>>Land Offset with a value of 2 (or more) to smooth out any artifacts. You'll only be adjusting the active parts of the selection, so only the sea parts will be affected.
If you still want to wipe everything under the ocean to a perfectly flat plane, use Tools>>Global Set>>Land Roughness Edit with a value of 0 to wipe out the fractal contribution and then Tools>>Global Set>>Land Offset Edit with a value of -100 to wipe out any raise or lower for land that you did. Setting things to 0 would likely put a ringing artifact around every landmass. If you've used the prescale offset editing tools, you should use Tools>>Global Set>>Prescale Land Offset Edit with a value of 0 to wipe those edits as well.
Here is a picture. Land is blanked out because I'm doing this for an author.
Thank you. Is that vertical line through the island at the right the -180/+180 seam in longitude or is it some other editing artifact? Other than that, selecting and blurring or selecting and setting a value should cleanup the artifacts.
If you'd like to keep a little fractal detail on the sea floor, setting the land offset edit channel to something like -5000 and the land roughness edit value to something like 0.1 will allow a small amount (10%) of the underlying fractal detail to be visible but keep it all down below the waves.
It's the seam, I think. After I had done most of the land the author informed me that island was supposed to be at the current position. In her hand drawn map it was much closer to the continent. I took the saved selection for the island and changed its longitude coordinates to move it to present position and then create mound. Previously it was done using simple create. That coordinate shift caused the seam to appear. Tried heal seam, but that didn't work so I painted it out.
I misunderstood what you said to do, but it worked out. I selected -2000ft height and below and then did several contracts to get it away from the continental shelf. Then set altitude to -12000ft and did several raise roughness by 0.1.
Thanks Joe
I do have another question. Is it possible to change the width in pixels of the rivers in the river overlay?
That's the river size setting. It affects the calculated height image used to calculate the rivers.