Thanks a bunch, guys!
There was still a lot I wished I had time to do with this image. Some of it was fairly rushed!
And yes, I do plan to share the waterfall method somehow. Just providing a TGD file isn't going to be enough, however. I will need to provide some significant instruction so that the user understands exactly how it works. Otherwise, I don't think it could be used effectively. I barely understand how to use the dang thing myself! The node network I ended up with is a rather complex and confusing tangle of blue nodes that I suspect would be a bit hard to understand if you hadn't built it yourself, even though I think it is about as well organized and labelled as it can be. It is rather mathy.
It has all kinds of adjustable parameters. You can control how far out the spray goes, the range from inner to outer, how thick it is, perlin noise variation in those values along the width, how wide the fall is, how much it flares out, the softness of the inner and outer limits, multiple levels of variation along the width and along the depth, the contrast of the variation, the softness of the side limits, and so on.
Multiple such falls could be used in a scene, though I found that it gets rather slow. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out a satisfactory way to make it follow a curvy path such that the fall lines radiate outward, diverging at different angles when the cliff line is convex or converging when concave. That was beyond my modest mathematical capabilities. I am sure it is possible though. Originally, I wanted to try to do something like Skogafoss:
But it would require a whole bunch of copies of my waterfall network with different settings and would be VERY slow to render. I tried and it was too much. I don't have the patience to keep waiting that long for test renders to see if my adjustments are right. To rotate each little fall such that it doesn't point directly along x or z, you have to put a 'rotate vector' node up near the top of the network and I noticed that this slows the falls down substantially. So if you have a bunch of little falls pointing in varying directions to get a natural look for a more complex fall, you need a bunch of rotated ones. VERY SLOW. And I tried to make the node network as efficient as possible, eliminating any unnecessary operations. I think it is about as fast as it can be.
Really, something like this is doable:
It would just take a LOT of time to set up and render.
Anyway, the waterfall was certainly the hardest part of making my scene. The rest was just an excuse to use it.
I was at one point trying to build Svartifoss, with its interesting columnar basalt. But modelling and properly texturing the basalt, along with all the plants and the many rocks on the ground, I soon realized, was going to take way too long and push me past the deadline!
