Well, after working on basins all day long, I think I found a good method for working on them. The problem has been finding the actual low point of the edge of the basin, so that lowering the altitude there actually affects things. Filling basins with land was not easy to spot those areas. Filling with water is better, and also easier to work with, since you can erase land while the water is still there and still reset the water later back to sea level.
Found an even better method, yay!
Turn on Prescale Offset Editing in your World Settings dialog, run a selection around the area, feather it, then Global Raise the Prescale Offset a small amount. Then shrink the selection and do it again. Vary the amount you shrink the selection by and the amount you raise the Prescale Offset. It allows you to raise the elevation without losing the fractal map bumps. I'll post a map update tomorrow, I think.
http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/CGTutorial/ has some useful techniques for working with FT if you haven't seen it.
Yes, I have that tutorial, although I wasn't following it explicitly. I had actually forgotten that he did so much filling and smoothing in the middle. I may take a copy of the original Batai and just follow his steps one-by-one and see what results.
Small technical problem - for whatever reason (probably because I'm on Windows 7, even though I've tried a different compatibility settings), the direct painting tools are not usable. I can't change the size or brush strengths. Prescale Offset painting goes straight to a 1 value rather than the 0.01 it should be. The Global Raising and lowering within a selection still works for me though.
It's a known bug in the last release. Contact ProFantasy tech support and they can point you toward a beta version without that problem.
Alright, starting over from scratch again, with the Beta version installed. Still have a few technical issues we're working out with it, but once those are resolved we'll hopefully be good to go.
Following the tutorial, I brushed up a couple of the smaller mountin chains, but nothing too much. The map I chose does a reasonable job of having mountains near the coasts, although the biggest ones are still in the center of the landmasses. Oh well. This is one of those areas where experience counts - the more of these you do, and the more topo maps you see, the better an idea of what is 'realistic' you have. As a newb to this, experience is still lacking.
I have filled in most of the below-sea-level lakes, and am just trying to find any small ones still out there before continuing. To help with that, I set it to high-contrast mode, with the seas colored black, and the land white. Then I just scan the white areas for black spots and those are my lakes that need to be fixed.
Once those are all filled in, I will follow the steps in the base tutorial listed above with basins. Note that the below sea-level basin in the 'Great Desert' has been filled in too. I figured for my first one I should stick to the tutorial, and wait until I've got more practice before breaking from established tradition.Besides, if I really want it, I can put it back in later manually.
Random experiment time!Just playing around to see what would happen - Starting over with the base map, I did the following steps:
* Lowered the waterlevel to -1000 ft.
* Filled the basins
* Raised the waterlevel back to 0 ft.
* Smoothed the Prescale Offset layer by 1
* Smoothed the Offset layer by 1
* Selected bands around the Horse Latitudes (30 degrees above and below the Equator)
* Feathered the selection by 30 pixels
* Lowered the rainfall by 20 inches, and increased the temp by 10 degrees
* Selected a band around the Equator
* Feathered the selection by 30 pixels
* Increased the rainfall by 20 inches
* Incised the waterflow using the settings in the basic tutorial
* Found the rivers.
* Exported the map
The goal was just to see how the bands would affect the climates being generated. Ideally, I should tweak the bands to take terrain into account. Figuring out how to do that will be one of the next things I do.
My Finished Maps | My Planet Maps | My Challenge Entries | Album: Pre-generated Worlds
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Assuming I stick with fantasy cartography, I'd like to become a World Builder, laying out not only a realistic topography, but also the geopolitical boundaries and at least rough descriptions of the countries and societies.
Heh. A few amusing things about this version of the map. First off, there is a fairly major river running through the desert from out of the mountains. In the south there is a desert on top of a mountain.
On the plus side, the climate is nicely varied and follows the terrain well.
My Finished Maps | My Planet Maps | My Challenge Entries | Album: Pre-generated Worlds
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Assuming I stick with fantasy cartography, I'd like to become a World Builder, laying out not only a realistic topography, but also the geopolitical boundaries and at least rough descriptions of the countries and societies.
I like watching the experimentation - and that you're going to all the trouble to work out the proper placement for everything ^.^ Lots of hard work, but it really does pay off as long as you're not like me (I skipped several steps and almost messed some geographic areas ...). Looking forward to more of this! My personal thought about the overall map is that it's kinda odd all the land masses connect to each other (just a personal thought, really). Personal thought aside, there, this is looking good. I'll have to keep an eye on this.
- Alizarine
"If they get too nosy, you know, just shoot them."
"Shoot them?"
"Politely!"
...
"Sir, I think there's a problem with your brain being missing ... at last, we can all retire to a life of luxury!"
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