Is it possible to use landscape layers to place water in my landscape?

I have a landscape generated with a heightmap from Gaea 2. I also have some masks corresponding to where trees and rivers are and I’ve imported both of these masks into their corresponding layer on my landscape material. I am able to use the tree mask with PCG to place trees just fine. But I am wondering how I can make use of the river mask. There are multiple empty rivers spanning my 1k x 1k landscape and placing river actors by hand throughout the whole level sounds awful. I feel like there must be a better way to do this. Is there?

Probably not.

Usually I add rivers to heightmaps by taking in river point data (sourced from varying sources ranging from historical data put forth by universities to USGS survey reports) and creating splines.

Gaea doesn’t generate this for you AFAIK. So you would need to define the spline points somehow.

Since you have to define the spline points somehow anyway, you may as well do it properly, in engine, while setting up whatever you need to define…

So there’s really no way around manually creating the water splines? That’s a shame.

Would you be willing give me a basic outline of the process you would use to add rivers? Or is it literally just manually dropping in a WaterBodyRiver actor and adding spline points? Am I overthinking this?

With the unreal crap you add the spline points, then probably adjust various things on the parameters and handle.

With a custom system you put in the spline points, click a button and generate the custom water sheet…

Usually you manually have to tweak spline point transforms to get curves to look right - even when you automate it, the points you get are usualy just XYZ at best.

So in a way, yes you are overthinking it.

In another. No you arent.
Setting up the 230 brooks my region needs is a total pita…

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