Avoiding very shallow rivers when using water/terrain mods

[Unassigned 23]

Often when rendering a region using terrain and water mods, the water level in rivers and streams is very low, with occasional patches of dry river bed. What's a good way to deal with this? I should like to use these waterways for traffic, e.g. water taxis.

[GMT 389]

afaik the only way to do this is by manually editing the imported map by making the rivers deeper:

this can be done either by giving the rivers etc a darker color in the greyscale image to be imported or by editing the map in terraformer / ingame after importing it

[vortext 573]

If you use the terraformer, try the 'compress terrain' function under 'global tools'. While it says compress It'll also allow you to achieve the opposite result, i.e. strech. This way you can deepen the waterways a bit while the remainder stays intact, and no need to it by hand either.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Texture mods don't matter. Any height mods should be temporarily removed while rendering. Just write them all in a specific folder, and take them out by moving it to the desktop while rendering.

[etahn54 0]

Looks like the dry river is just like the future, remove it, and change it to Maxis water terrain and default terrain.

[zahrul3 471]

Terrain and water mods have nothing to do with no water, lack of water is usually caused by height mods and the NAM Diagonal Bridges are known to cause water to dissapear. Delete them

[Unassigned 23]

Thanks to everyone who commented and suggested things to try. For the record, here's what I tried and what effects it had.

Taking out the mods which could possibly affect height didn't change anything - no Diagonal Bridges or ditto controller were installed, what was taken out was somewhat far-fetched: Ennedi's Slope Mod (medium), the and the

The map (it's Izidor44's map) came with a jpg image of the SC4M file. The way this image differed from what I saw in SC4 Terraformer suggested 'my' version was raised a bit relative to the uploader's. So I tried SC4T's global lowering tool but if I got rid of the dry riverbeds, large areas supposed to be land would be flooded.

Playing with Scaling Factor in SC4T didn't seem to change anything.

Luckily the compression feature helped, letting me get rid of most of the dry river. so it was feasible to fix the remainder by hand.

The streams on this particular map are shallow and narrow anyway, so I doubt I'll get anything sailing there, but as stated in my OP, this water level issue seems to be a general thing for me, so I'll still be looking how to handle it right.

  Edited July 6, 2012 by Unassigned  

[drunkapple 1,743]

G'Day probably the easiest way to get rid of patches of high river is to open the map in terraformer, then in Zone Tools click Make Valley. Change the Radius to 2 and the Strength to 2. Now follow along the dry course of your rivers.

Do small lengths at a time as you only have one undo, you can find this under Configuration Tools. It will only undo the last operation. If you make a big booboo more than one operation previously you can reload the map image and start afresh as nothing is saved until it is exported.

Hope this helps you out.

Cheers

drunk(always)

[Unassigned 23]

That's indeed a help, thank you drunkapple!