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How to make a Super Good Lake/moat/River T...

Genrail's Photo Genrail 13 May 2010

Step One:
Make your terrain
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Step Two:
Click the water tool set your water height (green box).
Then select "Create Water Polygon" (Red box)
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Step Three:
Click on where you want to put your water!
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Step Four:
Use the Smooth Terrain Tool on the borders of your River/Moat/Lake and you are all set!

NOTE: "RIVERS" TAKE A BIT OF PRACTISE TO MAKE CORRECTLY, [only use if you have mastered this tool]

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Here is a small lake with a river going into it and a small town/village
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Thanks for reading,

Genrail :P
Edited by genrail, 14 May 2010 - 22:36.
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Destiny's Photo Destiny 14 May 2010

...that's a river. :P
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Camille's Photo Camille 14 May 2010

yeah but also a moat. right?
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Amdrial's Photo Amdrial 14 May 2010

Oh, and don't forget to use the Smooth Terrain Tool on the river moat borders so it doesn't look like a cut-out.
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Rich19's Photo Rich19 14 May 2010

It's a lot better to manually place the points of the water polygon, making the boundary larger than where the "shore" is. That way you end up with a water polygon with, say, 6 corners rather than 300.
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Genrail's Photo Genrail 14 May 2010

EDIT: Added stuff
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Destiny's Photo Destiny 14 May 2010

...why is the house on an island in a lake in the middle of nowhere?! Pretty useful, I might keep this handy when I want to mess with WB.
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Amdrial's Photo Amdrial 15 May 2010

When you make rivers, try and just make use of multiple "square" segments joined together by their edges. It will make making rivers a lot less hard and also a lot easier to edit. They also look a lot less messy than when you make use of more than 4 polygons for a single river.
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Kris's Photo Kris 18 May 2010

Looking at the pic...The water has too much polygons on it = Performance issues
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lithon's Photo lithon 22 May 2010

thx for this steps, I faced alot of problems
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Nid's Photo Nid 24 May 2010

Your "lake" seems to have a lot of corner points, far too many (As Kris said), and that adds toward your waypoint number, which in turn increases lag, depending on how good your machine is, you will have a waypoint cap which will dictate the number of waypoints Zero Hour, and thus your computer can handle. The average number you dont want to exceed is about 1000 if you are creating multiplayer or community maps, because you have to take into account everyone else's computers too. It may seem like a massive number, but it's easy to achieve without even realising it, because after setting all the water points there you will have to outline areas, set AI waypoints, add roads if needed, and you may have more than one body of water too. By the looks of things that river and lake combo casts about 100 waypoints, possibly more, you can reduce that by placing points and corners sparingly to about 25-50.

Your tutorial is easy to follow, aye, but does not well explain how rivers work, or how to stretch or shrink the water texture on rivers. You have stated that people should not use the river tool unless they have mastered the tool but the tutorial says it will explain how to create a river, surely the river tool is key to this? And furthermore, if anyone has mastered the river tool why would they be using this tutorial?

I dont mean to belittle you here, or bash your tutorial, but you must take these things into account next time when you create a tutorial like this.

Other than the things I have pointed out though, good job, you seem to be helping others out, as the poster above me states. We need some more tutorials around here too, the place was getting a little dusty.
Edited by Nidmeister, 25 May 2010 - 10:35.
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