Rivers and streams question?

[demi]

I want to have a river that runs from a lake to the ocean but lost on how to accomplish this. Should I do it manually? Is there a river plugin besides atRainMaker? Anyone working on a river plugin?

My map is HUGE and atRainMaker plugin does the whole map so I would like to know. I may run it to see the effects but I wonder how long it will take to do a 2 giga pixel map. Rivers and streams are next in the map design so like to get an idea of which method I should use.

[Aaron]

Hi Demi,

Do you need the river to be sloping, or can it be flat? If flat, then you should use the heightfield tools to carve your river bed then the water map tools to flood it. For consistent results you may want to use the 'level at' brush tool to dig your riverbed, then use the smoothing, perlin, avalanche, and raise/lower tools to smooth/roughen the edges.

If a sloping water surface is required, then things get much more complex. atRainmaker was designed to flood non-flat rivers, but this makes it extraordinarily slow. Also, if I recall correctly (and I may be wrong here), it doesn't actually modify the terrain geometry, it just floods water over the top. Thus, you'll still need to use the heightfield tools to build your river course.

Cheerio,
Aaron.

[demi]

Thanks for the info. I guess I start edit mode then. since I need to do it from a slope and flat surface.