Drystone walls any ideas?

[illustratedman]

Thanks so much for your help guys, haven't had a chance to try either of these out yet as I have a house full of noisey nieces today - but will give them a go as soon as I get a chance.

your help is very much appreciated.

cheers
alex

[bigben]

Finally enlarged Mr L's pic and it's very cool (very simple way of getting individually shaded fields) .... but.... it demostrates a point I made about masking the wall with the same data that you use for the displacement. The green surface extends half way up the wall. Had a play with the tgd and set up the same masks I used for the image map version (same principle, different input).

I also removed the complement node and changed the settings of the colour adjust node to do the same thing.  The colour adjust node is a wonderful little thing. You only need to complement a colour adjust shader IF the black AND white level are identical. If they are different, simply swap them around to do the complement at the same time.

[Edit] and if you stick with your hand drawn masks, you could colour the fields with a second image map, using the greyscale values to either set the blending between two surfaces of contrasting colour, or to generate multiple masks to give you total control over each field.... Have a look at http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=2571.msg25757#msg25757 for an example[/edit]

[bobbystahr]

Well this is as far as I have been able to get it.This is taking off from my experiments with displacing roads and paths.  It seems that if you use a sharp as opposed to anti aliased map it works better...I also upped the dpi to 300. I have included in the zip, the full map and it is in my Public File Locker at my Renderosity homepage so should be open to at least members there but I think anyone can get at it. This is the URL:
http://www.renderosity.com/homepage.php?userid=77173   once there click on artist input and it goes to the Free Stuff, Locker, Tutorials, Blogs page. Title: DryStoneWalls.zip
You'll note in the Coverage Tab that I have adjusted the Coverage, Fractal Breakup and Fuzzy zone softness...this seems to control how high up the wall the grass comes or how low down the wall the brick comes. Dunno if this will be of use but thought I'd post it in any case.. ...

[rcallicotte]

Nice job, Bobby.

[bigben]

Nice one Bobby. I hadn't looked at the fuzzy zone softness for this... good thinking.

I think it should still work well with a smoothed imaged, particularly for lines at an angle. With an unsmoothed image you will get fine vertical jagged edges along the wall. The antialiasing works at the resolution of the image, so the higher the resolution, the sharper the image looks...  so increasing the resolution helps here too. 

You could also try using your image map as a displacement function to punch out the stones horizontally.

[Mr_Lamppost]

As I did say the Voronoi walls were a First Approximation and not intended to be a complete solution.  The same with varying the colour of the fields. Having proposed the method I decided to see if at actually worked.    

I was aware of the masking problem but for a quick proof of concept didn't fix tham.  Now I have started I am going to have another look and see if I can "Texture" the walls.   

bigben Thanks for the tip about the Colour Adjust

[bobbystahr]

Nice one Bobby. I hadn't looked at the fuzzy zone softness for this... good thinking.
.....
You could also try using your image map as a displacement function to punch out the stones horizontally.

Thanx Ben, calico...once in an area I find it best to slide all sliders every which way to see results...s'how I found the "fuzzy effect"...actualy all 3 adjustments in that area have impact on map placement so I recommend tweaking around with them a lot. Also I did mean to mention before that you can only apply one Projection type, as far as I've been able to sus out, so in order to get mapping correct on both direction walls I found in a previous experiment, noticably my experiment in approximating a Vue render   http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1520819
that I had to make my walls object in 2 parts...on the X axis and the Z axis and map accordingly with the Projection type relevant ie: Side X for the X axis and side Z for the Z axis. I also found that I had to rotate right my stone image so it appeared horizontal rather than vertical. RE: the displacement...had an idea that map resolution would help but my oh my does it ever impact render time with huge images...and I did bump it up a fair bit but I guess 10 wasn't enough. Hadn't tumbled to using smooth to eliminate those vertical lines...have to try that next...thanx for that tip.. ...