Another approach to functional city scapes...

[Goms]

ok, here we go again....

i'm still trying to get a city-like displacement shader with build-in options only.
what i discovered while playing around with the voronoi function was that you can alter the seed of the noise with a function.
using this, you get pretty random results by first creating random stripes in y direction and use this as seed input for random stripes in x direction.



and with some conditional functions i could also assign colors to the buildings corresponding to their height:



one of the problems i see in this approach is that you have these very ugly verticals; anyone with a good idea how to get rid of them?
tgd attached

[Henry Blewer]

Could this be put into the Fake Stones Shader?

[Goms]

nah, i dont think so, as the fake stones does not have a seed input. however, you could try to build one. ill try

[Goms]

hm, one sec. what exactly do you mean?
make a fake stones shader like this or just put this into the surface shader input?
this is possible, just adjust the size.

[inkydigit]

thanks Goms, I will check this out..

[Henry Blewer]

Actually the fake stones have a seed. You have the enter the number by hand. But honestly, this is way beyond my skill.

[Goms]

Yep, but there is no way to give them an input-seed as the noise functions have.

[Dune]

This is a very interesting method you came up with, Goms! The ugly verticals are of course (?) due to the perpendicularity of the displacement to the planet's surface. What if you slightly tilted the whole area? Only 1 degree or so in 2 directions, and the verticals wouldn't be as vertical anymore. The angle wouldn't really be noticable.

[Goms]

i thought about that too, but was not able to do so yet...
but have an idea:

[Goms]

no... what you need is a blur function.
the problem is that the seed rounds automatically....
also just tilling the whole displacement a little bit does not help.

any idea about how to get a blur function in tg2?
smoothing with the compute terrain does not help either.

[Goms]

ok, now each "building" has some space between the next one (see picture below).
i also have a version where every building is a little bit smaller in x and z (what is also great for the colors; more on this later).
the only problem remaining is how to get from one version to another without a sharp step...

ideas, anyone?

[Henry Blewer]

What if you used the tile method for the buildings? A black and white color patch could be made. This would be used as a mask to stop the vertical displacement in some areas.

[Goms]

hm, tile method?
what exactly do you mean by that?

[Henry Blewer]

Well, the city itself is really an array of tiles extruded/displaced vertically. (I am guessing) The same method could be use 2D and somehow this could become the mask to breakup the areas of buildings.

[Goms]

nah, the city is a x-only cell voronoi which seed is altered by a z-only voronoi.

new tgd with shrink function and spaces between buildings attached.