Make a rotating globe from a Fractal Terrain world

[Mouse]

Hi



A rotating globe like this one can be created surprisingly quickly by exporting the world of your choice from Fractal Terrains 3 as a Spin View Image Sequence, and then by using GIMP to compile the images as layers ready for export as an animated gif file.

I am not an FT expert, and know relatively little about how it works or what to do if things don't come out as you expect them to, but I found this tutorial (I suspect the tutorial is by Waldronate but can't find the original thread for it), extremely useful in generating believable and attractive land shapes. The only thing I did differently to the tutorial was that I set the size of the world to about 2x the size of the Earth.

PART I - Fractal Terrains Export

1. Create your FT3 world, and when you are happy with it click File/Export World/Spin View Image Sequence
   
   
   
   
   
2. Make sure the background colour is set to black, and that the 'Appear to be Shaded' box is ticked.
   
   
3. Set the image size to 250, and the number of frames to 200. (Try to keep the size of the image down. The reason for this will become clear when you carry out the second part of the exercise in GIMP. The number of frames affects how smoothly the globe will rotate, but it can be adjusted up or down according to taste)
   
   
4. Give the file a name and save the images in a folder of their own. (Using a separate folder makes the second bit of the process easier to manage, since there will be 200 small images produced when you click the save button)
   
   
5. Save your FT3 world if you wish to keep it, and close FT3
   

PART II - GIMP

1. Open GIMP
   
   
2. Use the 'File/Open as layers...' menu and go to the folder where you just saved your Spin View Image Sequence.
   
   
3. Select all 200 images by clicking the first one, then holding down SHIFT and clicking the last one.
   
   
4. The images will now load themselves into GIMP in the correct sequence - one image per layer.
   
   
5. Once the images have loaded you can either save your GIMP file, or not. The GIMP file is not the end product here, and can easily be recreated if necessary at any time.
   
   
6. Click File/Export as... and opt for a gif export.
   
   
7. Set up the following options (which appear the moment you click save)
   

Hit 'Export', and that's all there is to it

[waldronate]

Now that all of the GIF licensing stuff has expired, I should probably just put a direct spinning globe export in there. Possibly APNG as well...

Too many projects and too few hours badly scattered about.

[Mouse]

What Fractal Terrains already does is pretty spectacular, Waldronate, and the process really is very easy.

It must be easy - even I can do it, and that's despite me being a relative idiot when using both FT3 and GIMP

[FoxyBoxes]

Hi Mouse. I've been experimenting with Inkarnate on and off lately but decided to give FT3 a shot. It's great so far, but I'm having issues with getting more than 16 frames or increasing the pixel count when exporting frames. Seems that no matter what I do, I can only achieve 128 pixels and 16 frames or less (but lower values work just fine). Is this because I'm using the demo version of FT3? I can't find any info about this anywhere, so I just decided to make an account here finally (instead of lurking).

Thanks!

[waldronate]

Is this because I'm using the demo version of FT3?

Yes. The demo versions of FT are all limited to a resolution of 128 for the images and the maximum number of frames for a spin view is limited to 16. The full version doesn't have these limitations.

[TheLonelyWolfie]

This seems like a pretty cool post, I really want to try it now. Thanks for the Idea!

[Mouse]

Thanks - glad you like it

FT3 is a cool piece of software

[Redrobes]

Now that all of the GIF licensing stuff has expired, I should probably just put a direct spinning globe export in there. Possibly APNG as well...

Thats a cool idea but I checked a while back on this subject and APNG is not supported on all browsers (looking at you Edge....) so we could display it but many people see it static.

I wanted APNG icons on the zoomy maps.... grrr

Edit: Ohh and nice globe BTW !!!