
(Image is from the "Worked Example from Tutorial 3" example world file)
River ToolAs befits a Development release, there are a number of known issues currently present; they will be mentioned in a seperate post. You will likely encounter some odd behavior or bugs; please report them as you find them!The river device is a major expansion of World Machine's path tool, providing a great deal of power and flexibility in creating "hero" rivers; that is, major rivers that should be under artist control, as opposed to those created by an automatic simulation-type process.
I highly recommend reading this post on our Development Blog, which should be educational:
Learn about RiversThe blog post above defines a few terms that you'll hear thrown about frequently talking about the river tool, including things like Thalweg, Bankfull Width, Meanders, and more.
A number of tutorial worlds have been included in the "New Examples for River" folder, leading you from the simple to the complex. Hopefully additional guidance will be available soon to assist you.
The River Tool was created in collaboration with Dr Pasternack and Brown and their work into synthetic river valleys. It uses a geomorphic covariance structure (GCS) to describe the variations in the river channel and valley. Realistic (or not..) river features can be easily created, especially including variations in the river channel itself (depth and cross section), that have usually been completely ignored by computer graphic artists to date!
If you have questions, please post them here in the forums; many other people are likely to have the same questions, and having the answers in one spot is immensely useful.
Joining the river tool are the following immediately useful additional new features:
Other Immediately Useful New Features- Erosion Improvements
-- Active Masking Input allows you to have rivers and other masks carry away sediment that hits them.
-- Hardness Input allows you to vary the intensity of erosion across a terrain
- Better Curves
-- Curve device and Layout falloff curve now can use spline curves and share presets between them.
-- Curves are now a seperate datatype, and include sinusoidal, cnoidal, and perlin curve generators. More to come.
- Scene View device allows you to superimpose a water surface on the terrain.
- Advanced Perlin gains ability to specify the resulting elevation range in the device itself more accurately
- Minor view improvements : WASD keys can be used in the 3D view to navigate; View responsiveness and control now works better for render extents much smaller and larger than the standard 8km block.
- Device Versioning : To help with backward compatibility, devices can now have "versions"; when a new version of a device is available, you can update the device to the new functionality or simply keep using the old version for compatibility if needed.