Uneven Rivers from Create Water

[Patrick]

Hey!

I‘ve been playing around with the create water device and i think its amazing. However, i don‘t think there is a way for me to create uneven rivers with wider and narrower parts such as in this screenshot.

Also the thalweg behaviour described in this development blog interests me.

Is there any chance to either get this to work for the create water device, or is there a way to smoothly blend the river device and the create water device.

In the end i want it to be a full river starting from the mountains all the way to the ocean. So it would need tributaries, which is why I wanted to use the create water device.
With the river device I was able to get the river shape right, however the river started wide and didn’t start as a tributary.

I hope I explained my problem as clear as possible.

I appreciate any help I can get!
Thank you.

[HYLK]

Hey Patrick,

It is possible to combine the River Device and the Create Water device. What you can do, is create your “main” river with the River Device, and insert this as an existing water body into the Create Water device, like so:

This is a very crude and quick example, I hope it is illustrative enough. If not, let me know!

[Patrick]

Yes it does help me seeing both flow together. However i want it to be like the river to the right where it gets wider each time a tributary connects to the main flow.

I was hoping there was an option to either connect the end of the river device to the create water device if you understand what I mean. So that the beginning of the main river starts with the tributaries fron the create water device because the river you drew starts and ends abruptly, or to have the create water device create some sort of cliffs around the edges of the curves.

Anyways, you‘ve already helped me with your answer!

[HYLK]

Hey, I think this was indeed possible, but I sadly don’t have time at my hands right now to figure it out. I will set a reminder for later this week (Friday/Saturday)and take a look at it. Glad to hear I helped you a bit already!

[Stephen]

Hi Patrick,

That’s quite possible! To do this, connect the water output from the River device to the Restructure & Create Water device as @HYLK has shown above. In the Flow Restructure device, set it to drain only to existing water, instead of map edges. This will force the water to find a way only into the main river that you created.

Additionally, you can add multiple reaches to the river device and connect them. Set the further upstream reach(es) to a smaller bankfull width, and make them go in the direction you want to “collect” the tributaries nearby.

[HYLK]

Hey Patrick,

As promised, I’d come back to this topic! Here I’ve made a river that has an increasing bankfull width, combined with the Create Water device.

So, how does this work? Well, the part with the Create Water device is already explained above, so I won’t cover that again. To manipulate the properties of the river, you need another device, namely the Reach Character device, which allows you to transform/alter the characteristics of your river with a set of parameters and Curves devices.

So, I’ve taken a low frequency Sinusoidal Curve and linked that to the Bankfull Width port of the Reach Character device (red circled area). I had to use a low frequency because otherwise the river would decrease in width again (see below for a very extreme example of that). I will also upload the .tmd file (28.1 KB) for you to mess around with. The River device is quite tricky but extremely powerful, have fun!

[Patrick]

Hey Hylk,

this is exactly what I was talking about about! Thank you for the nice explanation.

The tmd file was also really helpful.

The answers of both, you and stephen were combined exactly what i wanted!