Pinching in Tight River Turns

[davidroberson]

Your bug report should include:

1. What happened: I notice this problem every time I work with the River device, and I’m sure it’s a known issue, but I still thought I’d bring it up in the hopes that a solution is being sought. Basically, when you have a turn tighter than a certain amount, the Valley wall gets a little pinch artifact that jumps out at you. I’ve tried a dozen different ways to “erase” the artifact but most only make the problem worse. It’s an easy fix if you save the terrain output and take it into Photoshop. There you can erase the crease with the Spot Healing brush very easily. It is a very out of the way solution I’d prefer to avoid, assuming the problem can be dealt with in the River creation process.

2. Does it happen consistently, or randomly? As mentioned, it happens with any river with tight bends, which means any good meandering river will have several of these artifacts.

3. The steps to reproduce it. Include a screenshot or world file if possible: I don’t have an image editing program at the moment, so I can’t highlight the problem in a screenshot, but it’s pretty obvious when you look for it.

Edit: I realized that ShareX will do some basic image editing, so here’s a highlighted shot:

[HYLK]

This is not so much a bug, as it is a result of the wide river valley clashing with a part of the valley elsewhere. I agree, this is not a nice result but sadly how it works and the predicted behaviour of the device. I suggest reducing the valley’s width (near tight turns).

[davidroberson]

@HYLK - There is still a lot for me to learn about River GCS control, so I don’t know how to control the river valley width, assuming that’s the technique you’re suggesting. I am working on a way to get around the problem, though. It looks promising and provided much better integration of the river into the terrain than I could have hoped for. If I can get it all worked out, I’ll post that as an extra Project of the Day.

[davidroberson]

Well, my preliminary results are pretty good. I have a bit of work left to do, but I can post a quick screenshot before I go to bed.

[davidroberson]

Not that I really need to point it out, but just to wrap things up here for now, I thought I’d mention that I’ve posted the results of my effort to work around the pinching artifacts. I’ll keep in mind what you suggested, HYLK, whenever I work with rivers. No reason for doing a work-around if I can avoid the pinching in my river GCS settings.