Hi, I was looking at a landscape scene for Carrara the other day and noticed that some of the objects such as a river was a model, not just some sort of weird cutout with a shader applied.
I've been trying to figure out how to dig out a trench or basic shape of the river in the terrain to match.
Are there any tutorials out there that explains this type of collaboration? or does anyone know how it is done?

Thanks
Jeff

 not sure how the one you are talking about was done, But if I wanted to do it I would make the basic shape of the river I wanted, copy/duplicate it, align the two, place them in the ground where you want them, select one and use a boolean to knock out the shape from the ground, apply water texture desired to the one left...  maybe expand it 1-2% to make sure there is no weird voids...

just a thought....

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Hexagon, Carrara, Sculptris, and recently Sketchup. 

Hmm, thats a good idea. but is it possible to boolean a terrain with a object and have the terrain remain a terrain not get converted to an object?

The scene I was looking at has a terrain with a shape imprinted in it such as the picture I've added to this post. then it appears to be a grid shaped to the imprint.

I think I might have figured it out but will have to test the theory.
I'm thinking draw the terrain then export the terrain as a map then import the map as a backdrop in the vertex room. then I should be able to modify a grid or something to the shape of the backdrop.

It sounds good on paper anyhow, guess I'll test that theory and see if it matches up back in the assembly room.

I tested it out the theory, it seems to work though it needs a good bit of tuning. The vertex object comes out much smaller and needs some significant scaling done to it. It'll obviously get pretty tricky running the object up hill. It's a fair start any how :)

You can "paint" your rivers in the Terrain Map Editor.Then you can bring in Plain(s) sized, revolved , located etc, to be your river water. Brian

bwtr