SSS river

[Kadri]

The last one looks good.
The river looks to me better when we can not see it on the far side.

[jamfull]

These are all looking great.

When you say a triangle river are you talking about the river bed (like a V)? or something else?

James

[Oshyan]

Last one is the best in my view, smaller stream, disappears in the distance, foam in appropriate areas, decent downslope/waterfall. I say keep the yellow flowers. The whole thing looks noisy or perhaps oversharpened though. To my eye it'd be better with either higher AA, higher detail, a smoother AA filter, or just not doing post work sharpening, depending on which of those apply. If post sharpening is being applied in any way, that's almost certainly the culprit. But as usual with these things, individual taste varies...

- Oshyan

[otakar]

The water in the last two looks great, your terrain work is also something. As for the river bed, that's going to take a bit more work, IHMO. Wild rivers seldom want to be confined to one perfect bed. You got side arms and pools, meander segments and eroded banks, etc. You'll see more of that in slower streams, but even fast flowing creeks are rarely regular in shape. Quite complex to model, no doubt...

[Saurav]

The last one is looking good however I agree with Oshyan about the sharpness of the image. Boulders look alright to me and the randomness of the terrain makes it all work. Looking forward to future iterations of this scene.

[Dune]

With triangle I mean the simple shape shader itself that is the basis of the river (actually two, by the way, but that's not important). Take a simple shape, make it polygonal and change 5 into 3... simple as it's name implies. This riverbed was 200x5000m., but at the end it tapers to 0. This is used to displace the ground down into the river bed.
The sharpness is overdone, I know and I agree. It was just quickly done in Irfanview, which I normally do a little more precise in PS.
The riverbed can 'easily' be changed into a set of intermingling streams (and pools as well, just warp a little rougher, and use more SimpleSS's). I might take up that challenge.
But I also thought of making the ground into big smooth and shiny black voronoi rocks.... TG keeps me busy, that's for sure.

Quick straight from TG test with 2 rivers. Problem is to get them off the ramp nicely.

[mhaze]

How do you stop the water shader colouring the banks?

[Dune]

Because it's a separate thing (plane, lake, sphere), only surfacing where the river is displaced down. It's easier to fake a river, I admit, by having it follow the terrain. You won't have transparency then (just use a reflective shader, blended by a SimpleSS), but that's not even important at larger distances. You could cover the edges (combination of Simpleshape masks, merges) with stones to stop the reflectiveness.

[Dune]

I took the second stream out again. In this setup I couldn't warp it independently. A simple painted mask with some sidestreams would work better I think, but well, that's not at play here. Working towards a shiny, rainy, smooth rocked valley..... this is a first quick attempt (in B/W  ).

[Dune]

1. An attempt at the smooth voronoi rocks and a PS painted river mask with 'tributaries'. It works, but the problem remains to get the mask over the ramp perpendicularly. For a river with no ramps and just soft rapids it's fine.
2. An experiment using a stretched and warped 3D diff scaler as the basis for an estuary system. Plus some procedurally colored Dutch cattle.

[mhaze]

You have some great ideas - love the estuary image but the in the voronoi one I think the rocks extend too far back from the river

[Henry Blewer]

I like the image 3Ddiif-rivertest very much.

[mhaze]

In fact the estuary image is stunning but I suspect the cows would sink!

[nbk2]

Looks fantastic, but I am also not so sure about the Holstein-Friesian at that location.

[Dune]

I have another one with some mammoths, but actually I just threw some things together as it was just about the voronoi. And that could be enhanced a lot; better grasses (this is just an internal grass mat), nicer mud, better background, perhaps trees....