Anyway to get reliable and consistant erosion

I have noticed that at different times of exporting my file I am getting different erosion patterns occurring.

If you make a simple setup with a layout generator, some extreme erosion and a height output node. and you export your map. Then try exporting your map using a tile build. If you use a file Input device and a Tiled File Input node and compare them you’ll notice that the two exports (the whole map in one file, and the tiled build tiles) have quite a different appearance. I believe this is due to the erosion changing on different export. This is regardless of the tile blending. obviously having more blending smooths out some of the erosion which sucks, but its still a fact that things can be quite drastically different between exports.

I’ve also noticed that at times the erosion node produces a bunch of North-South and East-West lines. There are plenty of other standard, wiggly erosion lines which are great, but there are also plenty of these straight parallel lines which just seem odd. Is there any way to counteract these?

Hi there,

Drastic changes in the erosion results for different resolutions (often becoming apparent in Tiled Builds) is a known issue with the current Erosion device.

One of the changes in the next development-channel build is designed to remove one of the major ways that erosion can change between builds at different resolutions. It should also help great reduce (but not eliminate) the tiled vs normal build difference. The fundamental problem with erosion and tiled builds is simply the extra contextual information of the terrain outside the tile that is lost when doing a tiled build. There are other things that will help with this too coming later, but the above will be a major help and is coming much sooner.

Cheers

oh, a quick followup:

The current best practice work around is to do any serious earth-moviing in a world creating a single file; save that result to disk, then load from from a second world for final detailing and partitioning into tiles. This route is also being enhanced by the new release, with Library I/O devices to make saving and loading multiple devices easy, and a way to sync two different worlds to use the same extents, etc.