Just like to help out after looking through the editor I finally figured out rivers and water. Here's a quick tutorial, when placing splines down press ctrl + click to make new points. Update: Make sure to make multple splines if your river is quite long as it seems to get quite buggy if it has a long distance. Aka seperate your splines into new splines. For lakes and ponds its recommended you use the RiverPlane blueprint or any water blueprint that allows scaling.
Cool thing. Up to the moment what I did to fill my river with water is just using one river plane static mesh and then scaled it up to a huge tile which cover most of the area. The downsides are that it probably costs a lot of performance because there is so many unneeded animated water underneath the landscape and that if gradient changes apply you kind of have to lay several tiles over each other with sometimes a gap between them. Using splines for that is not a way I thought about yet as I just discovered splines a few days ago for building roads. But redoing my rivers as splines and fill it with the river plane is probably the next thing I'm going to do as well because of the advantages. Thank you for showing that splines work well with water too. And I guess your video is also quite helpful for those who want to build streets with splines btw.
I looked how the Peterborough and Doncaster route river was made and figured out its the segments of a spline that need to be selected to apply a spline mesh aka the river plane.
Works like a charm, thanks RobertSchulz I think if you use plain old static meshes, the water material doesn't properly blend with the landscape, and will be totally opaque. This looks much better But now I have to take care of the ground material in my ditches, previously I had just left the grass. Lol. One more thing to worry about.
I used both the static mesh and the blueprint which uses said mesh and you're right, both of them are opaque. You can't see anything underneath the water surface. Until now, I thought that the water assets for TSW routes were like that and this also didn't matter much to me because it actually looks quite fine as well (I like reflection more than seeing through). Also as you mentioned you don't need to care about how the ground is looking and populated with rocks and other underwater vegetation then. But as you say this now, I maybe want to try it out to make it more transparent. But how do you actually do that? Just by using the blueprints as splines? I can't imagine this makes such a huge difference. Do you also use a river plane asset from DRA?
No, I used the ones from Vorarlberg, try that And use them in landscape spline mode like the tutorial. I may be totally wrong about this but I think then they end up in the LT (landscape tile) layer rather than the scenery tile.
No you're right the landscape contains all the data in regards to splines built in landscape mode. It's quite clever how it works.
