Another approach to functional city scapes...

Started by Goms, October 23, 2010, 06:33:57 AM

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Hetzen

#15
Hey Goms, the problem I've found with modulating the seed, is that there is no transition colour range for you to smooth your verticle cut offs. I've attached a clip file that allows you to put a slight slant on your verticles by using a clipped difference voronoi to multiply your cellular voronoi. The steepness is controlled by clipping the white point of the diff voronoi. I know you don't like conditionals, but these here allow higher vallues through.

Anyway, it maybe of some use here.

***Edit*** Just added a TGD file

Cheers

Jon

Goms

Quote from: FrankB
you're never going to finish this image ;-)

Dune


Goms

couldn't get it to work with your file, jon. i think the best would be to use some kind of blur functoin.
i also thought about using two versions, the normal one and the shrinked one, and then merge them by height before displacement, but that wasn't working either.

i tried to figure out a way to make the Gaussian blur function work here, but as my mathematical skills are very basic, i had no success...

maybe one of the planetside staff members has a tip for me? :)

Quote from: FrankB
you're never going to finish this image ;-)

Goms

ok, after thinking through this whole problem again, i fear there is no way to accomplish this atm.
The problems are:

- tg2 can't handle the step from 0 to x without something between these two values. therefore the "mesh" gets somehow messed up.

- its not possible, for as far as i know, to blur a fractional function.

- as the displacement shader seems to only work with scalar/color functions, there is no way to manipulate the input values by height, what could help when you use two versions (normal and shrinked) and choose between them by height.

well, its kinda sad as the overall look of this method was the best i could get so far.
but i also learned a bunch of stuff while doing this. :)
Quote from: FrankB
you're never going to finish this image ;-)

Hetzen

#20
Goms, I played a little more with my method last night, and had some further thoughts. I think you can get some decent variation, by maybe using difference scaler nodes or adding more of those chains in the .tgd with different seed and then masking between them. I had streets, pavements and grass areas by doing the last of those. Rather than relying on heights, I used the outputs of the conditionals as masks.

A 'Get Average' type node where you select a sample area would be quite usefull to make up a blur function, but I'm not sure it would help much in your case. What you could do, and it would be a bit of work, is comparing a voronoi noise with a spacial offset, then create a ramp between those two values. But I'm not sure if this would work when applied.

Another problem, is that TG really doesn't like sharp linear angles, you would have noticed this 'cracking' effect along your building edges. Unfortunately, if I had to animate something like this, I think it could become a world of hate with disapearing triangles on frame rendering. I would be tempted in using populations, at least I'd have decent textures.

That said, I was trying to make a form of squared rock a while back, which I think some of the techniques in this thread could be very useful, primarily mixing the x and z only cell scalar noises, coupled with the same seed diff scaler to blend, and conditionals to allow the tallest through. You could get some nice cracks and blocks when you apply this to a fractal terrain. But I guess I should reserect that topic rather than spam this one with idle ramblings from me.

Cheers

Goms

Regarding cracks, you can indeed use the same method I'm usind here; or at least a very similar one. I will add some more on this later, but essentially you can vary a second level of voronoi noise with the first one; meaning that the crack within a cell are different from the others. Ill post an example later. Sry for briefness, I'm on my blackberry right now. Regards, goms
Quote from: FrankB
you're never going to finish this image ;-)

Hetzen

Just been mucking about a little...

A few towers in there, some lighting spots type texture, and streets. Hrm, going to have to play a little more with this.

DVA99

Looks very interesting Goms,

At first glance I'm thinking of a high altitide image of Mogadishu or millions of containers.

I saw something similar in a tutorial made by Daz3studio but, I think this will look better since it's made in Terragen.

Please don't forget to post the final result.

Goms

so, here is what i was talking about.
the seed of the smaller noise alters within the cells of the bigger one.
this could be useful for plenty of stuff. :)

@DVA99: i'll try, but as i said before, i don't think my approach is going to lead anywhere atm.

Quote from: FrankB
you're never going to finish this image ;-)

Goms

Quote from: FrankB
you're never going to finish this image ;-)

rcallicotte

So this is Disney World.  Can we live here?

Hetzen


Tangled-Universe

With less size variation and a way to make the shapes less straight it would make a very cool rectangular noise-shape.

Goms

i did what you suggested before, but kept the seed variation.
just an gamma-changed diff-noise with the same seed, some multiplication, and it works.

see file attached. ;)

@Tangled-Universe:try it. just change the value of the scales and gamma adjustments.
Quote from: FrankB
you're never going to finish this image ;-)