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Adding some water

What I used to add water is very simple. It interpolates a spline with 4 colinear nodes - two on two of the edges, and two outside of the area. It then offsets them by some random values to make the river a little interesting. As the spline is interpolated, the height field is displaced - like shoveling out the dirt to make a bed for the river. It also stores data in an buffer I call the water buffer. It uses this to determine if a point is underwater, and if it's not how much water is available for plants at the given point.

Conclusion

This is a more powerful way to generate terrain than my previous programs. But I also hope this article helped illustrate the power of procedural methods for generating textures and models. Remember, I barely touched on the broad capabilities of procedural methods. Play around with it.

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