Thread: 'guided' fractal terrain ?

What you could do is use Campaign Cartographer, draw in your basic shapes and boundaries, and then fractalize them all (once you have a shape down, you can select it and just hit the Fractalize tool as much/little as you want). That's the only way I know of.

If you're into heightfields as the basis for your map, I recommend http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/Fu...ol2/index.html and http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/Fu...ol4/index.html as a starting point (and the rest of the series isn't bad, either).

Originally Posted by waldronate

If you're into heightfields as the basis for your map, I recommend http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/Fu...ol2/index.html and http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/Fu...ol4/index.html as a starting point (and the rest of the series isn't bad, either).

how large can a map be in Wilbur ? can I create a huge map by creating multiple adjacent submaps and stitching them together (will the borders fit ? even with erosion ?) ? is Wilbur globe ready or only flat-map ready ?

Wilbur is globe ready depending on how you choose your noise. The same can be said for Photoshop 7, for that matter... 32-bit Wilbur get purty slow at 4096x2048 at 8192x4096 it will almost certainly crash before you get anything useful done. For most purposes, get as much done as you can in 2k resolution, do a last little bit of cleaning in 4k(making sure to save), then upsample to about 6-8k and save quick before it punts.

Not necessarily the best tuts on this forum but my globefitting and burpwallow tutorials may be helpful if you like to work with heightfields.

The "problem" with wilbur is that you get central mountains. Placing your mountains on the oceanside is more difficult. I dabbled into it with my "Tarnath" map.
http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...-worldbuilding

if you want to know, the idea is to create a DEM/highfield for PERN and fit it to a globe

Originally Posted by Troedel

The "problem" with wilbur is that you get central mountains. Placing your mountains on the oceanside is more difficult. I dabbled into it with my "Tarnath" map.
http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...-worldbuilding

The problem isn't Wilbur. The problem is intrinsic to the noise algorithm used. It can be fixed, or at least helped by applying higher frequency noise with a flat-topped distance mask.

Wilbur's shape burst is pretty effective and quick. I'm still trying to come up with the absence of layers and layer masks in Wilbur.

I've had some degree of success in eight bit with Photoshop, but that's eight bit and... yeah. CS4 handles 32-bit after a fashion, and if I can ever figure out how to convert Open-EXR or 32-bit TIFF into .hf2 or .bt I will be camping happily.

Maybe putting the world in as a reference image and painting it in FT Pro might be one solution (I've never done it, so I don't know how difficult it is).

A couple of techniques I've been playing with:
1) RobA posted a fractal widget for GIMP that will fractalize a path. You draw in the broad sweep of the feature (coastline, contour, whatever) with a path or selection and let his widget randomize the boundary. It allows different fractal dimensions and scales, which I find useful - too many fractal maps I've seen on the net have everything the same fractal dimension. That looks okay for a glance, but if you look at a map of the real world you'll see it doesn't work that way.

2) Something I've played with for a map I'm working on is to draw the rough contours by hand. This allows me to place the mountains and river valleys more-or-less where I want them. I draw each contour on its own layer and fill it with white. I fuzz each layer with a generous blur and stack them up into a height map. Throw in some small-scale noise and run the whole thing through Wilbur's erosion cycle. The technique still needs some refinement, but I'm pretty pleased with it on the whole.

--Hugh