Flow Restructure/Create Water

[Charles]

Hey Stephen,

I love World Machine, and have been using it for years with great success in personal projects. There’s one issue that I’ve been struggling with, and that is creating bodies of water on my landmasses. Flow Restructure is an absolute must, as it generates natural paths for mountain streams, tributaries, and finally rivers that lead to the sea. But, by implementing Flow Restructure, I lose all the ponds and lakes… is there a way to achieve a happy medium? That is, attain the flowing water while keeping ponds and lakes where they may naturally build up? Would this be a new feature worth exploring?

Otherwise, I hope you are well. I haven’t seen any new developments for a while, and I’d even renewed my maintenance for an entire year where no updates were made. This is, in my opinion, the best terrain generating product available, and I would hate for it to become abandoned. I say this knowing that you are under no obligation to continue working on it if you choose not to, but I just wanted to express my appreciation, and hopes that you are doing well in whatever endeavors you currently pursue.

[WFab]

+1 For the feature request!

For now though…

You have to create lakes manually. Simplest method is to create a dent between flow restructure and Create water. The better method was described in a tutorial @hylk made a while back.

Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S86yXa1Gb0

Good luck!

[blattacker]

At some point or another, something like this was in the works, hopefully it still is!

Getting Back Into It

There’s good news and bad news: That was definitely part of the original idea of the water systems! The original Flow Restructure device had all kinds of provisions for leaving lakes alone above a certain size, allowing lakes in particular areas, etc. And the create water device could allow ‘unrealistic’ deviations from a flow structured terrain, that aren’t always that unrealistic – for example, death valley is cut off from the sea but has no lake The problem was, it was extrem…

[blattacker]

Also, as a quick addition to @HYLK’s excellent tutorial on manual lakes: If (following the directions in the linked video) you plug the resulting lake into a Flow Restructure device’s Drainage Input rather than a Scene View device, then pipe the results into a Create Water device (without connecting anything to the Existing Water input), the Create Water device should automatically “fill” the lake without having to adjust the height of the Constant device used to create the watersurface input if you move it around (though if the height difference is significant and/or you placed an Add Noise device before the Flow Restructure device to get more meander in your rivers, it may help to adjust it, just to make sure the drainage mask isn’t covering areas not covered in water), as well as getting the benefits of realistically placed rivers (including inflow and outflow rivers to the lake) and tributaries.

[WFab]

@blattacker Ever since I posted that comment, I’ve been working on adding a lake to one of the islands I posted earlier in WIP section. Using the method described in @hylk’s tutorial.

Turns out it isn’t that straightforward when working with multiple water sources, at different height levels, on an existing terrain. I was able to figure it out eventually (two full days of hair pulling math…)

Made a thingy, out of another thingy…

Made a water combiner macro that at least works for this project, and accounts for different height levels. Don’t know if I’d be able to make it work for every use case, yet.