Building a river

[EccentricCircle]

I've been thinking of trying to build a modular river system for use on my gaming tables. The project is still at the early stages, but i've been sketching different sections, and feature ideas and trying to work out what it practical.

There are two approaches to take; The more traditional route involves copious amounts of papier mache, and would be reasonably cheap, with few restrictions on size.

The more extravagant route would be to use 3d printing. This would have the advantage that I can model different sections in sketchup or a similar program and make much more standardised elements, mixing and matching to produce a comprehensive set of parts.

I've got lots of ideas to start working up, but the thing i'm most wondering about is size. How wide does a river section need to be in order to be useful on a battlefield without dominating it.

I think a 10 cm wide channel would be achievable, but comparing this to the size of 28mm scale figures it seems a bit narrow. More a stream than a river. I could make sections with only one bank, so that they can be combined to create wider sections, so that isn't necessarily a problem.

Can anyone who has built terrain of this sort report on what sizes they chose, and what works well for a typical game. Also how many bridges or other crossings do you tend to include for different sizes to table?

Many thanks.