Rivers, direction or meander?

[Sarithus]

Hello, Guild. Hopefully this is the place for this thread, for some reason I'm never sure where certain things are best suited.

Just looking for some opinions on a little question. When drawing rivers, are the loops and varying directions showing meanders of the river, or do you only show where the river is going? I suspect this is a question of scale, but I'd still be interested to read some thoughts.

Take this river and the bend within the circle. That could be a meander or just the direction that the river takes. If you zoomed into the bend, perhaps then is when you'd see other loops within that bigger loop which show the meanders. Correct?

I just wonder sometimes about the balance between making a river bendy, but also showing the direction that the river goes in.



Thanks.

[Chick]

I think what you have there looks about perfect

The meanders occur on flat plains, so showing them helps make clear that the land is very flat there. In hills and mountains, the rivers are steeper and run much straighter, no meanders.

As long as you have the rivers starting in high ground and ending at the sea, no one will have any trouble knowing which direction they go

[Sarithus]

I think what you have there looks about perfect

The meanders occur on flat plains, so showing them helps make clear that the land is very flat there. In hills and mountains, the rivers are steeper and run much straighter, no meanders.

As long as you have the rivers starting in high ground and ending at the sea, no one will have any trouble knowing which direction they go

I appreciate your post, but I think you may have missed the idea of the question. I understand where meanders can occur, but the thread is about not confusing meanders and just the direction the river flows in. If I said I might not consider the bend in the circle to be a meander, but just the change in direction of the river, does that help?

[Eld]

What chick said about the geographical appearing of meanders is correct as far as I know.
Your question, Sarithus, whether to show the bend or also the meanders of a river is indeed a question of scale. On your continental map you simply can't show the meanders. Another thing about meanders is that they lie within the same river bed, even if they change their shape over time, the river bed stays the same.
If you have a very big scaled map of a small area you could show the meanders for they will vary the river position for some dozen or hundred meters. Yet on a map of a continent or big state some hundred meters would not matter so you could leave it out and have a more clear line for the river. I hope that helps you. The chosen example in the first post seems rather as a bend, a change of direction, than a meander. I'd say there's some obstacle the river has to go around. An obstacle big enough for the river and too small for the map.

[Chick]

I'm not sure what you mean by "change in direction". The bend is just a larger meander. A meander is a bend, caused mostly by the river eroding its banks on the outside of a bend until it forms a new loop, connects, erases that loop and does it again. Bends can be caused by that kind of erosion, or by obstacles such as hills, but in general they are the same thing, just the path the river is flowing today.

[Sarithus]

I'm not sure what you mean by "change in direction". The bend is just a larger meander. A meander is a bend, caused mostly by the river eroding its banks on the outside of a bend until it forms a new loop, connects, erases that loop and does it again. Bends can be caused by that kind of erosion, or by obstacles such as hills, but in general they are the same thing, just the path the river is flowing today.

Well, by change in direction I mean that the bend isn't there because of erosion, but instead a hill might be there or for another reason perhaps that the land is steeper. If you zoomed in to the bend (on a large regional map) you'd see smaller meanders within it that you might show fully on a smaller map. If it was a smaller map that bend could represent the real bend of the meander. I think Eld's post sums up what I was looking for in that it's mostly a question of scale. I guess what I can take away from this thread is that on larger maps there can be fewer bends which show direction only, and in smaller maps you could show lots of little loops and bends.

Maybe not the best example, but the blue line here being the direction.

[Midgardsormr]

You ask interesting questions. I'd say the amount of meander you depict should, generally speaking, be relative to the scale of the map. Perhaps omit any bends that are of a frequency greater than 1 oscillation / half inch, or some other ratio that looks pleasing to your eye.

Of course, there's the caveat that it depends on the purpose of the map. There may be political, economic or cultural reasons to simplify the line or to draw it as exactly as possible, within the limits of your line width.

[Sarithus]

You ask interesting questions. I'd say the amount of meander you depict should, generally speaking, be relative to the scale of the map. Perhaps omit any bends that are of a frequency greater than 1 oscillation / half inch, or some other ratio that looks pleasing to your eye.

Of course, there's the caveat that it depends on the purpose of the map. There may be political, economic or cultural reasons to simplify the line or to draw it as exactly as possible, within the limits of your line width.

Thanks. It just felt wrong to be drawing a river with random bends without knowing what the bends represent.

[Pixie]

I'll throw my two cents in, just because I don't actually agree that it's a matter of scale vs. size of the bends. I mean, not only a matter of scale, but a matter of meaning. The detail of a map that you used in the start of this thread serves pretty well to explain it -

Mountains, trees, river width and the coastline aren't all in the same scale in that map. Nevertheless they are drawn as pictorial representations (trees would be less than a dot in size if the mountains were 20/30/50 pixels high!). Meanders in the river, in my humble opinion, should also be drawn as a pictorial representation only when they mean something. What they can represent is an area where the river is rather shallow and slow moving, sided by sandy strips and/or marsh. They should be drawn pretty small and close together, as opposed to the larger scale changes in orientation of the river bed. The typical bends found in the "cartographer guild pictorial style" are plain decorations in most cases (and very effective).

[seraphim72]

You might want to read up on oxbow lakes and how they form over time. TL/DR - rivers in flat areas tend to straighten and bend over time.