Erosion - Continuous flow and size.

Bug Reports
#1

Hi, I’m trying to design a terrain for a vehicle simulator, the world size is 1.5km x 1.5km.

The problem is I can’t seem to get realistic erosion happening. I’m trying to get good, continuous flows but it doesn’t seem to be working, they stop after only a short distance and pool (where real water would eventually fill the area and then overflow, creating continuous water courses). This picture is the kind of thing I’m trying to achieve (channel running off bottom left): http://www.cepolina.com/photo/nature/mountains/air_views_mountain/5/air_view_mountain_landscape_hills_desolation.jpg

Another issue I have is with defining the size of the erosion channels, I would like to have the channels join up into larger channels sooner instead of having many small ones.

I’d like to get there with minimal manual work. Any tips would be greatly appreciated, thanks for reading,

Sam.

#2

Hi LJFHutch, can’t see any terrain in that pic. I think your link’s broken

The length of flows is a limitation with Wm’s erosion at the moment unfortunately- AS FAR AS I KNOW. Maybe Stephen can come up with some ideas to increase them. You might try setting up some river beds with splines in Layout mode. That might increase the number of channels you get. You can also use an Equaliser device on any Flow mask output. You might be able to use that in some way to increase channel number and depth.

monks

#3

Thanks for the info, that’s unfortunate about the flow length. Would it be possible to just find the lowest point and cut a channel through that during the erosion cycle?

Basically I want valleys but all I’ve been able to produce is thousands of tiny channels. The only way I can see of getting around this is doing everything manually, which kind of defeats the purpose. I want large scale/long term erosion if that makes sense.

For example: http://morguefile.com/archive/display/135740 When I try to create that sort of thing in WM I just get thousands of cuts everywhere but hardly any major changes.

#4

Hi there,

Monks is correct about the flow limitation. However, for large scale/long term erosion, have you tried enabling the “Geological time enhancement” option in the erosion dialog? It might do exactly what you’re looking for. Try the “Classic WM + Power” preset, for example.

Cheers

#5

Ah thanks! I did what you said and used Geological time enhancement with that preset, then combined it with some blur and expand nodes to remove the small channels, leaving only valleys behind. I had to feed it through 4 erosion nodes but I got what I was after :smiley: Valleys continuing right off the map.

If anyone is interested here is the final file: http://www.mediafire.com/?spsmks28hrbf8x7

Thanks again for the help.

#6

Looks good! Glad you found something that worked. Using the blur+expand is a good idea as well – a lot of the devices interact in really interesting ways, beyond just plopping down an erosion device.

#7