Any existing work on water flow over terrain?

I’ve generated some great terrain in WM Pro, and I’m now interested in post processing the heightmap to calculate where water would flow naturally on this terrain. Other than the flow/wear/deposition maps, has anyone done any further work in this area? I’ve written code in the past to cut water courses out of terrain heightmaps along splines w/ fractal noise, just wondering if anything along these lines exists for WM? Something to rough out the hydrological code hierarchy would be ideal, especially if the output was splines instead of images… Thanks!

I think this is exactly what WM needs right now Kbonin.
I use a combination of generating terrain via contours, Wilbur’s incise flow algorithm and flow maps, river mask images, World Machine spline layouts, and occasionally other programs. Yes, a bit tortuous!
My approach tends to be some pre-processing with a little post as well because I use topo maps as ref images for terrains The problem currently is that World Machine erosion transport doesn’t travel that far. I tend to use WM channeling erosion to cut tributaries off the main rivers that I input as a mask. I find that Wilbur’s incise flow works well. That approach sounds pretty much like what you have in mind here, but you’d be outputting splines. I store all of my river data as vectors in a GIS prog, but have to convert from raster to vectors first.

monks