Automatic landscape carving

Drop a river spline and the terrain carves itself a bed with authored banks and material layers — no third-party landscape-brush plugin required and no manual sculpting.

Placing a river on a flat landscape usually means going back to the sculpt tools and digging the channel by hand. Oceanology Pro can do it for you. Turn on Affects Landscape on a river, lake, ocean or island and the body's own shape is composited into a landscape edit layer: the terrain drops to form the channel or basin, the banks fall off at the angle or width you authored, and the landscape material's weightmaps get a riverbed layer painted along the same shape. Move the spline and the terrain follows it.

How the carve is built

Carving runs through an editor-only brush manager actor that derives from ALandscapeBlueprintBrush and registers itself as a landscape edit-layer renderer. For each brush actor it runs the same chain: capture the body's shape, either as an orthographic depth capture of a river's spline meshes or as a canvas polygon for closed bodies; turn that into a signed distance field with a seed pass, optional blur passes and jump-flood iterations; cache it per actor; composite the falloff carve into a heightmap ping-pong target; run the weightmap pass; and accumulate the body's velocity, water surface height and depth into the combined water texture.

In Pro every one of those stages except two is a native pixel shader in the plugin's own shader set. Only the river spline depth capture and the canvas polygon draw are still materials. In practice that means the carve no longer depends on a long stack of brush material graphs that a project can silently break by touching one of them.

What you can author

• Blend mode: Alpha Blend affects the heightmap in both directions, Min only lowers the terrain, Max only raises it, and Additive blends against a flat zero-height input so ramps and detail underneath survive.
• Falloff: by Angle or by Width, plus an edge offset and a Z offset.
• Curve channel: an elevation curve asset, channel depth, channel edge offset and ramp width shape the cross-section of the bed.
• Brush effects: shape blurring, two octaves of curl noise for a bank line that is not mechanically straight, a displacement texture with height, tiling, midpoint and channel selection, inner and outer smooth blending, and terracing with spacing, smoothness and a mask window.
• Weightmaps, per landscape layer: falloff width, edge offset, a modulation texture with its own tiling and influence, midpoint and final opacity.
• Island actors, which use the same brush settings to raise land instead of lowering it, and which can double as the ocean's shoreline source.

Defaults per body type

Curve, heightmap and weightmap defaults live in the plugin's water editor settings, split per body type, so newly placed rivers, lakes, oceans and islands arrive with sensible carving settings rather than zeros. The brush manager also exposes a Force Update button for when you want to re-run the whole carve explicitly, and reports through the map check when a landscape is missing edit layers or the brush is not registered on one.

Compared with Oceanology NextGen

This is one entry on the Galidar roadmap. For what already shipped in each release, see the Changelog.