Some fractal terrain questions

[Naima]

Ahhh , Indeed ... "the secret Option" its actualy looks like a secret passage , u need to push a button and appears .

Ok now I see a texture climate setup with tundra or alpine , boeral etc .. but what do I have to do there? its replacing the gaia iamge or something else?

btw what climate is hills, mountains , rock?

also if I replace those base textures, what size can I use as max and will it be visible in FT?

Also if I paint directly a climate zone , do the relative temperature and rainfall regulate accordingly ?

[waldronate]

Ok now I see a texture climate setup with tundra or alpine , boeral etc .. but what do I have to do there? its replacing the gaia iamge or something else?

It's just another shader, like Altitude, Climate, Gaia, or Image Climate. The idea is that the flat colors of the Climate shader are replaced by a tiled image for each climate type. It's something that can be done fairly easily in a paint program like Photoshop, but this feature allows for an implementation directly in FT.

btw what climate is hills, mountains , rock?

Those climate types are used by FT's Simple Create mode and will not be created by FT as part of its normal operation: you have to paint them in directly. The reason FT has "climate" types and not "biome" types is that there are things that can get painted into that layer that aren't biomes.

also if I replace those base textures, what size can I use as max and will it be visible in FT?

There isn't a cap on the image sizes, but FT will crash if you overload its addressing space. Also, the images don't have to be the same size: you can have more detail in some climate types than in others.

Also if I paint directly a climate zone , do the relative temperature and rainfall regulate accordingly?

No. FT doesn't implement this feature in the climate painting.

[Naima]

Thanks, I was doing also a zoom in the heightmap in Photoshop , but this seems to produce unwanted artifacts when I enlarge and reimport in wilbur etc ...

so I picked the original world map in wilbur , the source for the main heightmap and I did a crop to selection to the desired to be zoomed area , now How can I do to enlarge that area to the size of the original dimensions of 16384 x 8192 to have more detailed in erosion?

[waldronate]

Try Surface>>Resample>>Simple to chop out a portion of your world for a zoom.

[Naima]

Perhaps I repeat something already asked, but I can't find a way to export without the viewport borders, I selected export world as sphere image , select png , select the size 16384 , type the name but when I click save nothing happens , the window closes and nothing is saved ... perhaps I am missing something?

also is it possible to import directly from out of FT a Climate map worked out in PS to apply inside FT and get use of the textured climate ?

or also import rain and temperature maps?

[waldronate]

In FT, the Export Sphere Map Image is limited to the in-memory capability of FT (unlike File>>Save As:Special MDR, which has no such limits). This in-memory requirement give a maximum practical size of around 6000 to 8000 pixels, depending on a whole host of factors. It would certainly be nice to give a useful error message instead of the old error message (which was the Windows notification after FT crashed). If you would like to try to get a few extra GB of working space with the retail 32-bit FT version on a 64-bit version of Windows, Large Address Aware | TechPowerUp Forums offers a way to set the /LARGEADDRESSAWARE flag on the FT executable.

I can't think of a way to use an external climate map with FT. However, it should be possible to get the same effect directly in Photoshop using layer masks and tiled texture layers.

I don't think FT will import rainfall or temperature maps. Its primary stated function was to export, after all...

[Naima]

Ok thanks , do unknow how in photoshop I can do to blend the different layers or levels or climatic zone maps one into the other?

As for the rain and the temperatures , on what are based how are calculated? I was planning to use them as a basis and then refine some areas according to the pression zones I designed , and change them ...

Working inside ft directly on those to get the desired. Climate appear in a zone is quite hard especially to make appear chaparral / mediterranean combo .

Also how can I lower the limits of the temperature or rainfall to a certain max and minimum? I do not want for example erroneously reach 149 F but I woudl like to set the maximum to 100 .

[waldronate]

You should be able to blur the layer masks to get the edges smooth. Adding a little noise and playing with the knockout should allow for a transition that's a little nicer than a straight blend.

According to the FTv1 manual, temperature and rainfall are computed as shown below.

I don't think it's changed much since then except that an option has been provided to specify the base temperature directly instead of using the physical model of albedo, solar input, and greenhouse feedback.

Looking at the FT climate table ( http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/climateinfo.gif ) shows that most of the interesting transitional climate types occur only in a very narrow band of rainfall. In the real world, of course, timing of the rainfall makes a huge difference in the final climate type. Timing is affected very strongly by atmospheric transport due to heating (the typical monsoon is such a case), and FT doesn't have a model for that. It's always instructive to load up a height map for Earth and use the default climate model to see what FT generates. It's not much like what we see on a regular map...

There isn't a way to force min and max values for things in FT, sorry. You'll need to do that sort of thing by hand.

[Naima]

There is an amount of fractal though ? Because I tried to generate worlds with 0 roughness and 0 land and I could get all different distributions...

[Naima]

Also another question , in Wilbur my max elevation its 10000 and minimum -11000 , I guess I can rescale them as I did once but I forgot the tool , but when I save and import in FT the heights are different and I get ranges of up to 35000 m in highest and - 35000 lowest , what's happening?

nvm I forgot to change the metric units .