I noticed that all rivers flow in a fixed direction even if the river has some bends in it. You will even see some rivers flowing from one side of the river bank to the other side which is just ridiculous to look at.

But when you look at all the streams in skyrim they all flow and follow the contours of the land the way the steam flows along in a very realistic way. A good example of this is the steam between the western watchtower and fort greymoor to the west of whiterun.

It seems as though the rivers were animated by a totally different person that did the streams. And if not then why did they not animate all the rivers so that they look as good and realistic as all the streams. Its all very odd.

Rivers are placed as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brush_(video_game) while streams are custom models, I presume.

Very good point, though I have to say that the waterfalls look awsome.

Well, for one thing, even if they used the same person that doesn't mean it would look good; rivers and streams are still rather different in how they work. Second, using the same sort of animation for both might very well have been too processor or graphics card intensive; rivers are a lot bigger than streams, after all. The way rivers look in this game is still an improvement over having them always stuck at the same elevation and not moving at all like in Morrowind and Oblivion, at least. I'm sure it'll look a lot better in either mods or the next game - these things tend to have to go in steps rather than all at once.

And I suppose in the Gamebryo engine there's just no such thing as brush-specific material configuration, i.e. texture alignment.