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Thread: Fractal Terrains export resolution

  1. #1
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    Help Fractal Terrains export resolution

    Hello,
    a question for those of you who use Fractal Terrains: what is the maximum resolution you are able to export an image into bmp? I am using a Mac, so I have to use FT (2.3) under crossover (though I am not sure that that is actually the limiting factor), and if I try to export anything above 8000*5000, or 9000*6000 if I am very lucky, the program always crashes.
    Does anyone achieve a significantly higher res?

    Thank you.
    Last edited by feanaaro; 11-28-2013 at 02:33 PM.

  2. #2
    Administrator waldronate's Avatar
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    No, that's about the limits of what the 32-bit version of FT can do.

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    Do you, or does anyone, know whether FT 3 is able to do better? And how much better?

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    Guild Grand Master Azélor's Avatar
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    8000x5000 that's about my best

  5. #5
    Administrator waldronate's Avatar
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    FT3 should be able to do a little better than FT if you're running a 64-bit Windows OS and have 4GB or more of memory available because it was compiled with /LARGEADDRESSAWARE on (which allows the 32-bit program to access 3GB of RAM instead of just 2GB). If someone would get around to writing one, a full 64-bit version of FT would be able to handle larger things. The usual workaround is to export multiple files and merge them with a third party piece of image editing software such as Photoshop or GIMP.

    One trick that might get you a little larger exports is to save your file, exit the program, restart the program, and export your data without doing anything else. FT uses system RAM for its undo buffers and restarting the program gets you a state with no saved undo data.
    Last edited by waldronate; 11-29-2013 at 03:33 AM.

  6. #6

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    Quote Originally Posted by waldronate View Post
    FT3 should be able to do a little better than FT if you're running a 64-bit Windows OS and have 4GB or more of memory available because it was compiled with /LARGEADDRESSAWARE on (which allows the 32-bit program to access 3GB of RAM instead of just 2GB). If someone would get around to writing one, a full 64-bit version of FT would be able to handle larger things. The usual workaround is to export multiple files and merge them with a third party piece of image editing software such as Photoshop or GIMP.

    One trick that might get you a little larger exports is to save your file, exit the program, restart the program, and export your data without doing anything else. FT uses system RAM for its undo buffers and restarting the program gets you a state with no saved undo data.
    Having ported Windows and Mac Terrain Rendering software from 32-bit to 64-bit addressing, I can say that its relatively easy to do on Windows. But for Mac, it required porting the code from 'Carbon' to 'Cocoa', since the Carbon API is not 64-bit capable, only 'Cocoa' is.

    There is also a 2 GB or 4 GB limit to many image file formats. 'BigTIFF' and PhotoShop 'PSB' are fairly new and support huge files.

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    I highly doubt that FT will ever be ported to Mac. I wonder whether using it under Crossover impact on this problem or not. I may finally buy version 3 if it can give me higher resolution exports, but if in the end is going to be roughly the same it does not justify the expense for me.
    I've tried to compose different export, but besides the inconvenience the problem is that FT is not perfectly coherent in how it renders something, which leads to some small glitches, especially in the bump map (which is the only one for which resolution matters, anyway). Practically invisible, sure, but if I hadn't a little of OCD I would not be here, right?

  8. #8

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    It's been a while, but I was exporting tiled images to produce a 30000x15000 pixel map in the end. I manually aligned them in photoshop. I believe that each tile was 5000x5000 pixels as I could reliably export that size, though my memory may be off and they may have been smaller.

    If you look through my early posts about 'Abebe' and most of the posts in this thread that I started (I probably sound grumpy) that mention Fractal Terrains, you'll find my notes. I don't have time to look now, but I hope that gets you started.

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    Professional Artist Naima's Avatar
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    I have a 64 bit windows 7 and 32 gb ram , how much big I can export?

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    Administrator waldronate's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Naima View Post
    I have a 64 bit windows 7 and 32 gb ram , how much big I can export?
    It depends on what you're trying to export. For CC3 exports, there is a practical upper limit. For image files like JPEG, BMP, or PNG, you should be able to get well over 5000x5000 or more with the basic version (depending on projection and other settings). Just make sure that you save everything before trying large exports (I've seen folks get 8000x8000 and higher; that eats roughly 1GB of RAM for workspace). FT3 doesn't do the best checking for limits, so you may be able to get a larger export than someone whose system is a 32-bit OS with lots of drivers and installed software. For something like a raw binary height export, the limit set in the software is 100000 (roughly 10GB of data written); this happens because that kind of export doesn't need context for projection or rendering.

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