I've posted the same question at GameDev Stack Exchange, but unfortunately I am not getting any response. So I am going to post ( and reword) it here. Hopefully I can get an answer!
I have a terrain ( in the form of mesh/element), and I want to indicate how the water flows in the terrain, subjected to gravity force and the terrain condition ( of course).
A crude way of doing this is to take every single mesh element, then draw the water flow direction from the highest point to the lowest, but I think this will result in a lot of ugly arrows that although can roughly point towards the correct directions, but really don't look nice when view as a whole.
Is there an algorithm, or even better, an existing code implementation ( in the form of well-documented APIs with Windows DLLs, or open source soure code), that allows me to generate the water "flow map" in an elegant, intuitive, look-nice way?