I am glad you liked the work so far Gold
I have used Terraformer before and like the results, definitely worth getting it. If you are referring to the /LARGEADDRESSAWARE command line switch for FT3 I am using it already and I think it helps
While looking around I can see traces of you following the same path as myself with regard to map generation, including raising the octaves for more detail in FT3. I had settled on 30 as the amount because it gave me that much more detail before the erosion process. One trick I had found was doubling the area in Wilbur using the Size option, however once it doubles to the 16k resolution, the fill basins no longer works properly. This was a shame for me as it would have got me roughly to 1.3 miles per pixel instead of 2.6 (approximate figures). There was the possibility of doing it after the erosion work, and the large address aware FT3 did import the bigger map, however I had wanted the extra detail for the erosion, incision work. Sadly doubling without detail just results in blockiness. If Waldronate ever reads this I wonder if there is an unreleased version of Wilbur that works with 16k wide heightfields and fills basins correctly?
Anyway, moving along, I wanted some form of contour lined map and spent some time considering how to do this. I could take the map from FT3 to CC3, save the contours as WMF (Windows Meta File), bring them into Adobe Illustrator and then across to photoshop. If someone knows a better way / easier way of doing that please post as I would love to do it!
In the end I settled on Wilbur and using the Save Selection feature to dump out selected height ranges to PNG files. First I had to decide on a useful scale, as I had mentioned before I only needed 6 or so classifications of height, but wanted the look that a decent relief shaded and contoured map can bring. My inspiration was Relief Shading - Colors - Hypsometric colors, I loved the look of the french map shown and had noted that the Israh tutorial had used similar colours. However I also needed to meet the heights specified in the rulesbooks I planned to use, my aim was to create a map for the Adventurer Conqueror King system (ACKS) a D&D retro clone that I liked the look of. It used only three height categories, Flatlands (plains), Hills and Mountains and did not actually define any heights for them. So looking for inspiration I turned to my old Ad&D books and dug out copies of the Wilderness Survival Guide (WSG) and Worldbuilders guidebook (WBG). In the WSG I found they broke the heights down into the following: -
0ft - 2000ft = Flatlands
2000ft - 4000ft = Hills
4000ft + = Mountains
Helpful, however I like a lot of the systems in the WBG and they took a more detailed view: -
0ft - 2000ft = Flatlands
2000ft - 3000ft = Rolling Hills
3000ft - 4000ft = Foothills
4000ft - 7000ft = Low Mountains (roughly the Appalachians)
7000ft - 15000ft = Medium Mountains (roughly the Alps or the Rockies)
15000ft - 30000ft = High Mountains (roughly the Himalayas)
30000ft - 50000ft = Very High Mountains (For low gravity worlds)
50000ft - 100000ft = Extreme Mountains (for extremely low gravity worlds)
Now I knew the last two would not feature on my world, but were interesting none the less (I had hand waived the less gravity on my world by making the core denser [Pseudo Science BS]). however the extra detail appealed to me. so I went with it.
Here are my early attempts at the contour lines, I brought in the height selection png files, used them to generate a selection mask and used "Stroke" with a 1 pixel wide black to draw the contour line.
The attached version below is larger and clearer when clicked.
This all seemed to be going how I wanted it, I would now start generating contour lines every 500ft from sea level up to 30,000ft or so (less actually as max height shown in Wilbur (Surface-> Min/Max) showed a max height of 25633ft. However to get a rough feel for the areas involved I generated a Wilbur Land Colour file set it to cubic blending and tried it out. Here is the result (as usual the attachment has more detail.
I have put the Wilbur land colour file on my webserver if anyone wants it ... right click and save this link: - Wilbur Land Colour File
It gave me the rough feeling I was looking for so I progressed to working on the contour lines. More of which next time!
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