[WIP] Lorn questions...

[orionunas]

Hey guys~

I"m attempting to use Wilbur, and I have read the tutorials on how to import a black and white mask, however, my image file is rather large... (7680x265 I've also gave Fractical Terrains 3 a go, and am planning on jumping back and forth between the two. I've created my Mask with Gimp, since I don't feel like paying for Photoshop when I am not getting any money off what I'm creating. The map I've created is for my D&D Campaign. Now, here's the question!

In the Wilbur tutorial for importing a mask, the file they use is a much lower file size than the one I'm using. How can I adjust the settings to achieve the relative/same results?

[waldronate]

See https://www.cartographersguild.com/a...chmentid=80066 for an excessively long-winded step-by-step example.

The simplest way that I have found to get good a good balance between quality of results and time of execution results is to start at a much lower resolution than your final result (say 1/16 of your existing map or around 480 pixels wide), process the resolution, scale up the result by a factor of 2, reload your mask and force your terrain to match the coastlines of the now higher-resolution mask, process that resolution, scale it up, and so on until you get to your desired resolution. If you want to go one step past that and then use GIMP to scale back down that final step, you can get clean edges on coastlines and rivers.

For best results with masks in Wilbur, I do recommend looking at using two-color GIFs as the inputs to Wilbur rather than other file formats.

[orionunas]

See https://www.cartographersguild.com/a...chmentid=80066 for an excessively long-winded step-by-step example.

The simplest way that I have found to get good a good balance between quality of results and time of execution results is to start at a much lower resolution than your final result (say 1/16 of your existing map or around 480 pixels wide), process the resolution, scale up the result by a factor of 2, reload your mask and force your terrain to match the coastlines of the now higher-resolution mask, process that resolution, scale it up, and so on until you get to your desired resolution. If you want to go one step past that and then use GIMP to scale back down that final step, you can get clean edges on coastlines and rivers.

For best results with masks in Wilbur, I do recommend looking at using two-color GIFs as the inputs to Wilbur rather than other file formats.

GIF's instead of PNG/JPG/TIFF/whatever? Any specific reason why?

Also by scale you mean in GIMP or in Wilbur?

[waldronate]

The best and most consistent results that I've been able to obtain with Wilbur so far require absolutely hard edges (a pure black and white map with no shades of gray). You can use any image as a selection, but you'd want to ensure that the image is pure black and white or you'll need to use Select>>Modify>>Binarize after every time that you load a mask. That extra step comes under the heading of "hard".

I like GIF because I have had problems with reading some PNG and BMP images as selections in the current version of Wilbur. JPEG files are lossy, meaning that the hard edges will be corrupted and that the binarize step will be required. Wilbur doesn't read TIFF files at all. That leaves GIF as the most commonly-available image format that Wilbur reads and that is lossless. It also supports 2-color palette options, meaning that black and white is easy to force. It also is compressed, allowing typical masks to be a few kilobytes in size. Plus, Photoshop's save for web option has a save-as-gif option that lets you directly specify black and white, so I can eliminate any need for the Binarize step during operations.

The technique described above is all done in Wilbur except for the preparation of the masks. The link I provided shows the step-by-step process of taking an image, what masks prepared from that image will look like, how to calculate intermediate sizes, creating the raw altitude layer cake, and a couple of iterations of the scale noise/fill/incise/precipiton/scale loop to get to the final size.

[orionunas]

Ah yes, the link, haha. I remember researching this thread, but didn't equate 1 + 1 = 2. I was also in school at the time using my phone, so I didn't want to select the link until I got home, in which case I semi-forgot about until now!

As a side note, do we know if Wilbur will get tablet pressure support? That would be great.

[waldronate]

A very long time ago, Wilbur had pressure support. I removed it a while back because the Wintab libraries were a little long in tooth and I never got around to doing something else. It also doesn't have multi-touch support (except as emulated by MFC), so that's something else that I could do if I had some free time.