Hio again

Making rivers and waterfalls may sound easy by just placing water but to make it right is really hard and needs a huge amount of effort to get it right.
For this example i expanded the last terrain by a few blocks and want to make a waterfall on the cliff side of it. You need some additional blocks while "building" these thuings and I will use white wool in this example but since the block will be removed at the end it does not matter which block you use.



Here I set the general layout of the river near the waterfall with coarse dirt. The shape of the river can differ depending on what kind of river you build. Here it is a little mountain river. First I fill in the river with white wool and then only remove parts of the toplayer to place water there. Later you can just remove the wool of the levels below and it will fill with water automatically.



After this step I start with the waterfall, later I'm gonna talk a bit more about rivers but in this part of the guide is about the waterfall. I recommend to arrange the bottom of the waterfall in a way that the water wont flow through your whole build before you can even start with the river or lake at the bottom.
My waterfall at this point looks like this



It does not really fit into my image of a waterfall that expands in its size the further it falls and spreads a bit more. This one is only 4 blocks wide and in general I don't like it. So the first part of adjusting it is trying to make it fit the borders I want a bit more, both in its width and when the layer changes.




You can use your additional block like here by building from the top of the water to remove a layer so that it fits better. I know it may sound absurb but even in a waterfall you can try to make a flow throughout it.
Sometimes there may be some difficult to build parts like this one here.



But you can use the technique I used in the pictures before to lower the heught at some points or build some wool behind the water to higher it (wool in the middle in the next picture, compare the next and the last picture for the differences)



Often you have some parts of the waterfall, if not the whole waterfall, that are just plain flat.



Here I would like to change the height on several points but without expanding to the right side at the same moment. Therefor you have to block the water from flowing there with some blocks.



For the rest of the waterfall I continued to build it like this while trying to establish a little flow through it. My wool for the rest looks like this



After this you have to carefully remove the wool. Always remove the inner wool before you remove the outer wool because otherwise restricting ones may not work and all your work is destroyed just like that. If you play on a server or with mods that enable barrier blocks you can also use them as restricting blocks and just let them stay there.



And this is how it looks in the end in this example. Another example for a waterfall I built is this one, where I worked with the same techniques like explained in this guide



And just like that I changed a plain mountain area to something that seems way more alive. I hope this helps you build your own terrains and as always ask if you have any questions or something similar xD

Link to the next part

Im also part of the DurinsBuilders Building Team and as expected focusing on smoothing all the terra there xD