From FT to Terragen (Part One)

[Greason Wolfe]

Fractal Terrains to Terragen Version 0.9.43

This is a process I've been fiddling with off and on for a while now and until just recently, I'd never had much success with it. Then I was struck by an epiphany and thought I'd share it with others who might have experienced similar frustrations trying to export FTPro results into Terragen. Before getting into the process, however, it is important to make sure you have all the software that will be needed.

FTPro
Terragen (I'm using the uregistered/free version 0.9.43)
-Windows Version : http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen...nloadwin.shtml
-Mac Version : http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen...nloadmac.shtml
TGPGuilib_v_1_2_7 http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~jomeder...lib/index.html
For Export Only (which this tutorial is based on) http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~jomeder/feo/index.html

You will also need two coloring schemes for FTPro (see attachments)

Your Preferred Coloring Scheme (mine is FT2TG.ltg)
TG-Greyscale.ltg (include as a zip file)

Once you have these installed, you'll be ready to begin.

There are probably more efficient ways to transferring results from FTPro into Terragen, but I've found that my approach is, perhaps, the simplest in terms of understanding what is happening between the two software packages. Rather than exporting FTPro results as a RAW or MDR file and trying to import those into Terragen, we're going to work with grey-scale images since, at least for me, they are more easily controlled and visualized. And that brings us to our first "difficulty."

Theoretically (although unrealistic), we can use up to 16 million colors to represent elevation in FTPro. The same holds true for Terragen to a certain degree, but with the math involved, it is much easier to take the grey-scale approach and work with 256 colors. The key is in distributing those 256 colors efficiently such that we have enough room to work with, particularly for elevations above sea level. And I promise, we are going to get to that in just a little bit. First, we need to get ourselves a world we like.

Typically speaking, when we generate a world in FTPro, we have some fairly straight forward parameters that we follow. For instance;

Highest Peak : 30,000 feet (9146 meters)
Lowest Depth : -30,000 feet (-9146 meters)
Circumference : 25000 miles (40244 kilometers)
Roughness : 0.54
Percent Sea : 70
Land Size : 2.67

There is, unfortunately, a problem with these parameters that isn't obvious at first, but I will do my best to explain it. Terragen works with two types of measuring units; Meters and Terra Units. I'm really not sure what Terra Units are supposed to be, but I'm sure we're all familiar with what Meters are, so we'll stick with them. The problem comes from our Highest Peak to Lowest Depth range. That's a lot of ground to cover, so to speak, and in Terragen this can cause quite a bit of exaggeration if we aren't careful. Fortunately, we can bias this range since we won't be seeing anything below the surface of the water in Terragen. (As a side note, there is a plug-in to allow for water transparency, but I haven't messed with it yet.) But we're going to need a few numbers;

1 meter = 3.28 feet
1 kilometer = 0.62 miles

Now, keeping in mind that we are limited to 256 colors in grey-scale, all of which we are going to use, we want to bias our elevation range such that most of those colors will be used to represent areas of our world that are above sea level which should, in turn, give us fairly gradual slopes when we import the results into Terragen. To that end, we first must define our elevations based on what we need and what we don't need.

What we need is a wide range of elevations above sea level since that is the part of our world that will be needing the most detail in Terragen. What we don't need is a wide range of elevations below sea level since they won't (for the most part) be visible as anything other than water in Terragen. We are going to do this by defining our overall elevation range as a percentage of the colors available to us. For the purposes of this tutorial (and the examples here-in) I went with 82 percent (210 shades of grey) representing elevations above sea level and 18 percent (46 shades of grey) representing elevations below sea level.

With that decided, the next thing we have to do is determine just how much elevation each of those colors represent as individuals. To get a decent amount of height to our world in Terragen, we're going to have to exaggerate things just a little bit. I went with 30 meters of elevation per shade. Doing the math, this gives us the following;

Highest Peak : 20664 feet (210 colors x 30 meters x 3.28 feet)
Lowest Depths : -4526 feet (46 colors x 30 meters x 3.28 feet)

(If you want higher elevations above sea level, pull a few colors from the Lowest Depths and add them to the Highest Peak value)

One thing we're going to need to know for rendering in Terragen is the circumference of the world. Leaving this at a standard of 25000 miles gives us 40323 kilometers. This will be important for scaling functions when working in Terragen. Conversely, you can use metric values in FTPro if you are more comfortable with them, the process is still basically the same and any differences should be fairly obvious.

Now we generate until we find a world that we like and want to work with. Of course, we'll need to set our Coloring Scheme.

At first, we can use any Altitude Coloring we want and adjust the parameters to represent that 82 to 18 ratio outlined above. We'll also tweak the shading slightly for some added texture when we start working in Terragen. The FT2TG.ltg file above is the color scheme I use for editing my worlds in FTPro and geared towards representing lowlands as forest and grasslands, low to mid-level slopes as mountains and all upper slopes as snow. It has already been adjusted to represent the 82:18 ratio and been tweaked for shading, but I would recommend using whatever color scheme you are most comfortable with as long as you can easily identify what elevation your mountains are starting at and what elevation will typically be snow covered on a year round basis. If you use your own coloring scheme, you'll need to make the following adjustments under Map>>Lighting and Color>>Altitude;

Land
Colors : 210
Blending : Checked
Shading : Checked

Sea
Colors : 46
Blending : Checked
Shading : Checked

And under Map>>Lighting and Color>>Intensity, we'll set the parameters as follows;

Light Direction
Elevation : 43
Azimuth : 315
Vertical Exaggeration : 1.1
Shadows : Just above the N in None for a little added texture in Terragen

Then it is off to editing land until you get a look to the world that you are pleased with.

Part Two Coming Soon!!!