Hi team! Just wanted to provide a quick suggestion that doesn’t seem to exist: expanded river morphology. It seems that rivers at this time are limited to tapered paths that don’t consider material hardness, implement unevenness, or allow variations such as braided rivers, anabranching rivers, etc.
I hope this is something you consider implementing in the future and I apologize if I missed that this topic exists elsewhere.
Much of the controls here come with water, headwaters, river width layering river nodes and also Anasmotosis node. A
ll 5 are absolutely possible,nbut logically trying to tame them could be difficult yes, there isn’t too much room for art directing with precision from a hybrid simulation.
I’ll see if I can post some follow-up examples here tomorrow to help out.
This 100%. Current rivers dont provide much control.
Itd be nice to have a slice of a larger river rather than the whole watershed needing to be simulated (afaik, I am happy to be wrong, this would be useful) leaving you with a tiny river.
In my specific use case I need to define a specific depth for gameplay purpose, I have a water plane, and I need to level the riverbed specifically below it (moving a 16^2 km landscape worth of splines, objects, and whatnot isnt feasible every time I make an adjustment in gaea). I’ve been able to cope by making the river a mask using photoshop curves, then making that mask a constant 50 minus 1m in greyscale to ensure it stays the same depth for the water plane which is at 0 z position, with some blur and distortion tricks to make it blend a little more with the output of erosion, but it still looks very unnatural. Maybe the new blend layers in ue can deal with this, but it still wouldnt allow for congruent erosion all the way to the shoreline. Also this doesnt allow for the anastomosis if that is the correct term beneath the surface.
World machine has an alright tool for creating spline rivers. OP’s suggestion in conjunction with a similar spline tool would be absolutely killer (which it looks like the spline is coming in gaea 3, super excited).
Also having the option of the river bed be a target height for erosion would be nice (or even better works symbiotically with erosion nodes as far as sediment flow.) Maintaining a specific height with erosion has been a huge pain point with either turning depositing as low as possible leaving erosion thats way too strong, or deposits drastically alter the heightmap in undesired ways.
This is my main issue with wm’s implementation is it flattens a certain area around the river, which sticks out even with the distortion effects, and eroding after to blend the river in naturally messes with the river bed height leaving you with a river that goes uphill if it travels between two high hills or a canyon. (maybe theres a workaround I didnt look that deep, I just messed around in the free version of wm for a bit)
