Hey there @deedox! Unfortunately I’ve been unable to find a solid workaround for this issue as of yet. Another user and I had put in bug reports for this issue in the meantime.
Not sure if you have tried this already but before importing your heightmap select perspective in your viewport and go to front.
You want to move your landscape up on the Z scale so it is aligned with the green gridline
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Replicated it a second time as well. Seems that too many spline points cause this. After about 15 it will start to happen. I just started making river “sections” using multiple rivers and merging them
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Hi there, i’m also strugglin with this issue … from my point of view it looks like there is very bad terrain detection of code part that generates water body and inability to turn off waterbody edge curling “feature” doesnt helps too … water body should be exactly as wide as terrain it affects or for safety even little bit more wide (maybe with setting to set offset) but someone in epic decided to make it wrong just because he can or othervice i just dont get it …
Hey there @Kower99! Welcome back to the community! There’s 2 possible issues at play when it comes to landscapes of a massive size. One issue is that once a landscape has too much height in the Z axis, the landscape brushes start producing weird results. The second issue is the issue with enough spline points causing a single river’s landscape brush to become distorted.
my landscape is capped to 500m(height) and scaled according to it but to the point of issue… ive tried even smaller landscape scale and even placing new spline @ problematic place and none of that solved issue … it just generates weird edge curling(i beg for option to turn it off) @ edge of watter witch results in watter not reaching edge of “river bank” … no matter if i use “affect landscape” or sculpt manually … no matter how wide i set it to be in those points even neighboring ones … if it just decides it will not work @ that place i cant do anythin with it… to be fair sometimes (not always) sculpting edges of that landscape part helps with that issue but not always …
Hi, it might not be the fix for you or anyone but for me it worked, I tried everything i could to make the river affect the landscape without any succes. Though, when I set the river as a blueprint, it worked just fine for me, so maybe it will help someone passing by.
I had same issue and the UseFixedWaterDepth ‘trick’ fixed it for me but what I’ve noticed when trying stuff out is that my old map had no separate landscape layer for water deformations. On the new map when adding water bodies there is automatically added Water layer where they reside on, I guess it makes it easier for water bodies to not get messed up that way.
That can sometimes happen when the water layer isn’t generated, like when adding a water system to a map without edit layers enabled.
sad find related to fixed water depth: if you enable it in material, your gerstner waves settings on the water body seem to be ignored, whole water becomes flattish but the actors that use buoyancy look only at data from the water body gerstner waves settings… which means desync between what you see as water surface and what they use to stay afloat
I spent hours looking for this solution. Thank you!
YEA… Thanks Alot Dude . it just was i looking for
I see that it has been a year since your post but if still an issue and for others.
I have a landscape created in Gaea so I do not want the water to affect the landscape and I had the ‘floating’ water as you.
Go to the WaterBodyLake (or ocean etc) and find the Water Material. Browse to and open it and search for Water Opacity Mask Offset. It seems that this is the value that determines how much the water should blend into the landscape. It’s default value is -24. Which if you think of it is only 24cm and way to small. So change it to something like -500. or 5m.
And the water will now feather into the landscape.
I don’t know if there are any side effects as a result but it solves this issue.
Also, I had done this in 5.1 previously, and it still resolves the issue in 5.3.
Cheers.
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Hey Guys so I had the same problem, and here is what fixed it.
I downloaded the Heightmap from gaea and The Pivot is not correct
before
moving the landscape down in the Z to the 0 point seems to fix it
hope this helps
Thing is, moving the lascape is an immidiate fail.
It will cause all sorts of problems for a lot of different things. From foliage to grass maps and a billion other things.
Ergo, the suggestion of doing this to fix the water is an automatic no-go.
If the engine is broken, the engine is broken.
If epic doesnt care, epic doesnt care… but you can still bug the living hell out of them with bug reports for it… after a billion or so they may fix it 
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Awesome. Fixed it for me because I don’t want the water body to affect my imported LIDAR landscape. Cheers 
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Ya, Un check Affect Landscape in WaterBodyRiver. This will fix and stop affecting your landscape too
I had the same issue, solved by changing ZOffset from 0 to 100!. All the other solutions above did not worked for me. Just by accident I changed the Zoffset 
So took me more than a year 
Greetings from the Netherlands