[Award Winner] Tutorial on Meandering Rivers in Photoshop

[Chick]

I have created a tutorial on making more realistic meandering rivers in photoshop.

This is not about river placement, it's about how to shape and meander them more realistically.

I'd be delighted to have any feedback on this.

[waldronate]

Very nice tutorial. I was a little sad to see no reference to the actual Meander River in Turkey (modern name is Büyük Menderes, but the word meander derives from the classical name Meander) but such is life.

[SJS]

I have only skimmed this but it is very information-rich. I like the way you started off with pictures of actual rivers and compared them to fantasy maps. That's a great way to do it. Haven't tried the tutorial part yet, but the info is very useful on its own.

Thanks!

[jbgibson]

Okay, just for Waldronate -- The Maeander:
Attachment 68550
... Or the bottom thirty-km-as-the-crow-flies, which looks to be ninety km of actual channel :-). That's a wikimedia commons file - freely useable.

Which does bring up an issue with meandering - these are very small-time meanders- while intricate, the river is narrow and many many of the loops are under a km diameter. Chick, your technique could be used at any scale, and can even work at multiple scales at once. The overall course of a major river as viewed from orbit could wander across a floodplain 200 km across. Then viewed up close, individual wiggles and oxbow lakes could be as tight as a couple of hundred yards across.

It occurs to me one could use your method to get great oxbow lakes and back channels, by saving intermediate steps as you warp and rewarp a path. Save the one you like best as the main channel, and chop off chunks of alternate paths as lakes, marshes, and fertile farmland strips.

I love how entire branches of a relocating river can be orphaned -- look at the Maeander channel that hugs the NW edge of the silted-in bay - it looks to be disconnected at the upstream end. Talk about your ready-made difficulties; a party poling a boat upstream on a lazy river doesn't notice the broader channel has no appreciable flow, and gets miles up a stagnant 'fossilized' channel before realizing it ends in mud and alligators...

[Chick]

Okay, just for Waldronate -- The Maeander:
Attachment 68550
Which does bring up an issue with meandering - these are very small-time meanders- while intricate, the river is narrow and many many of the loops are under a km diameter. Chick, your technique could be used at any scale, and can even work at multiple scales at once. The overall course of a major river as viewed from orbit could wander across a floodplain 200 km across. Then viewed up close, individual wiggles and oxbow lakes could be as tight as a couple of hundred yards across...

The very definition of Fractal Although for a physical process like this, there is a lower limit to the fractal shapes, based on the constraining terrain and sediment size.

[Chick]

How many people have tried using this tutorial? There are several comments on it, but I can't see any rating (good or bad), and I'm not sure why. Is the person who started a thread unable to see the rating, or has no one thought enough of this to rate it? And if the latter, what could I do to make it more useful?

[Azélor]

It looks really useful but I haven't tested it yet.

[Deadshade]

There is no Liguify filter in GIMP.
One can use Filters>Distorts>Warp but it doesn't display the circle and (I believe) the circle radius is limited in size so no large loops.

[Ariz89]

Wow really good loooking! I'll try it

[Chick]

I wish PS were much more reasonable to purchase or subscribe to, it's such a great tool. The new CC (Creative Cloud) version of it is more affordable, but still expensive enough to keep a lot of people using GIMP.