Water placement issue

[teksurgical1]

So am I overlooking something simple here, I am dealing with water on a planetary scale.  I want it in a certain section of the planet, but nowhere near the poles.  When I add a lake object, and I drag it around in the preview window to near where I want it, the lake object seems squashed from all the translating around and once I move it close enough to the terrain to start seeing water where I want it, Terragen crashes every time.  I realize the lake object is connected to the planet so it conforms to the curvature of the planet when you move it.  This works fine until I drag it away from the poles, but then it doesn't seem like the lake object can rotate the way it needs to. 

So I tried masking with image maps, and I have a surface layer masked out where I want the water, but where do I connect the water shader? Do I need to create a disc myself? I can't seem to connect the lake object itself to the surface layer.  Am I missing something obvious probably?  Any help is greatly appreciated!  thanks

Noah

[Oshyan]

You can connect the water shader directly to the main surface tree as another surface shader. Just make sure that the network setup is such that other shaders will not overlap it (either put it last in the chain and mask it directly, or use masking or other constraints on the other layers). Note that, if my thinking is correct, water transparency will not work correctly with this method. The alternative would be to create a 2nd planet whose diameter is the right amount larger than your base planet to set a water height (you could also mask it). This should give you proper transparency since there is underlying terrain.

- Oshyan