Procedural Buildings

[pyreflos]

First of all, I want to say that I'm fairly new to Terragen, so bear with me. Secondly, I know there have been a couple previous posts on procedural building generation, but they're pretty old and contain broken/out dated links. I'm also operating on the assumption that Terragen, like Grasshopper in Rhino can have simple nodes stacked and reused in more complex ways later (via clips).

So... I have a card object (to be replaced with a obj or something later) that is populated in a simple grid that sits on the terrain. How to I randomly generate a change in height of each card without affecting width or depth? I was thinking I could somehow affect the y-axis scale without the x and z scales changing, but I cannot see how to do it in the population node. It has a minimum and maximum "object scale", but no option to split out separate axis.

Any thoughts? Am I going about this all wrong?

[Dune]

If you add a power fractal with displacement at the end of the line, or somewhere after compute terrain, but separately from the main line of nodes, and sit you pop on there, you can get them to 'jump up and down'. I use that method to get a pop of birds on different heights independent of terrain heights. But you can't use it to lift exactly 'per object'. A mask could be used to do exact displacements.