Help with distribution shader on tower

[snake_eyes]

Hi all, I am struggling with an issue on a tower I created.  I created a distribution shader with feature scale 50, lead-in scale 500, and smallest scale 50.  Noise octaves are set to 5.  I have no clue what is happening here but I get some really strange this horizontal plateaus.  I've attached an image of what is going on.  I might be a little over my head here and could use a little help if anyone thinks they know what is happening!

[Tangled-Universe]

Difficult to see with such a tiny image or without a tgd file to actually look at it.
By distribution shader I guess you mean powerfractal shader?

I think what you see are displacements which turn inwards on themselves, or in other words:
Parts of the right side of your tower are being negatively displaced towards the left and vice versa.
Depending on the scale of your fractal it may lead to these weird shapes.

There can be other issues like the type of displacement you're using (lateral for instance, without computed terrain) or that you first need to compute the terrain before applying these displacements.
Difficult to tell with this information.

[snake_eyes]

Thanks for the fast reply, I appreciate it!

Attached is the .tgd with the messed up towers.

[red_planet]

Just a quick response...

Looks like your lead in scales on the Tower displacement.

Bring them down, they're planet sized at the moment !!

You can then bump up your displacement amplitude, beware at some point ..it will break up the surface...

Hope this helps

Rgds

Chris

[dandelO]

Also, the feature/smallest scales of 'smaller tower displacement' are a bit wacky, in comparison to the huge(100,000m) lead in scale. Those small scales of 40m and 35m are likely the cause of the horizontal spikes. That is the displacement that is 'lateral normalised'.

* Reducing 'Tower displacement' lead in to 10,000 and 'Small tower displacement' lead in to 1000 gives this...

[attachimg=#]

[Tangled-Universe]

Ghehe, that's cool I was about to write the exact same thing

Anyway, I would always avoid those lateral displacements and just use a redirect shader, works in a more predictable way, for me at least.

[snake_eyes]

Thanks a TON everyone - I really appreciate your willingness to open up my file and figure out what I did wrong.  I'm still in the very early learning stages and appreciate all the help that has been provided.  I was able to fix my file and everything looks much better now.  A million thanks!