An alternative option for rivers

[WFab]

I just exported a terrain with water mesh, and encountered problems. It’s very hard to line up the terrain mesh properly with water mesh, especially in programs that work in relative scale (most artist oriented 3D content creation tools). And once I decimate the terrain mesh, water mesh becomes nearly unusable.

What I propose in an alternative to current system. Of course a better implementation would be appreciated, but this is the best that I could come up with just yet.

1. An option to export water as a part of the terrain mesh, baked in. A mask for water bodies, and maybe a flow vector map for the texturing later would be how we can separate them later.
2. An alembic cache with both meshes baked, and maybe even particles flowing for direction (not sure if it’ll be useful though). This way they’ll look the same in every program that supports alembic. It can probably be done with OBJ as well, but I don’t think it’ll be editable in a way alembic is. Also, alembic also has many other options for proper UVs, detail normals etc for later down the line.

Right now I’m trying my best to adjust using conventional scaling, but I’m having problems lining them up proper in vue. No matter what I do, it just doesn’t line up. Terragen was much more friendlier, blender was the best.

Original WM screenshots

[Stephen]

Hi there,

That’s very useful feedback! There are a lot of different use-cases and restrictions when it comes to water, so WM needs to be very flexible to accommodate everyone’s unique needs.

When reducing the terrain mesh, it’s very important to have the land-water interface retained to prevent alignment issues as you note…

The water data is kept internally in a maximally-flexible form in WM so that almost any use case can be accommodated. So for example, for #1 if keeping the water-surface baked into the terrain works better, that can be done (decomposite the water type and take the combiner-max of the terrain and the water surface to get a baked-in water).

I think ultimately, what would be very helpful is to have a small library of ready-to-go water blueprints/macros to make it easy to export in whatever format makes the most sense.