In the last post we ended up with some continents generated by Fractal Terrains 3, we had modified them to better fit with my aims. For example, I had not wanted continents with central mountain ranges, so adding land to one side of a continent created a more natural feel. Also the thin stranges running between continents did not fit with my ideas so I lowered them back into the seas! I actually found this part of the process quite enjoyable, teasing the final shape I wanted out of the initial rough outlines.

Next I wanted to use the forces of nature to create a more realistic worn away surface for my world. To do this I migrated the data out of FT3 and into Joe Slayton's (Waldronate on this board) other excellent tool Wilbur. I used the "Special MDR" choice and exported with a resolution of 8192 by 4096. I wanted the maximum size I could get to keep as much detail as I could which was another reason I had lowered the planet size down to Mars sized. I also downloaded the latest 64bit version of Wilbur to take advantage of my Windows 7 64bit PC with lots of memory. When I imported the MDR into wilbur it was the flipped vertically, but that was not a problem and with a couple of clicks we were the right way up again.

As a precursor to getting started I had read the excellent ISRAH tutorial many times, however I did not plan to do any of the erosion or incise flow work in FT3, I wanted the higher speed in 64bit Wilbur! The Israh article had some excellent colour templates for Wilbur and FT3 which I took advantage of at this point and applied the land and sea colours.

The ISRAH tutorial can be found online at ..

The Genesis of Israh; A Tutorial

I suggest reading it a few times to get the most out of it and be prepared to throw away a few mistakes when you first try it

Anyway enough for now, some more details of what I did in Wilbur later.