Desert

[Dune]

I got some solution as pictured in the latter two images.

[inkydigit]

HI Ulco, yes, the corners do look odd... what about some stacked sss decreasing in scale?
I like this idea of procedural pyramids... some inspiration for me!
thanks for sharing
Jason

[j meyer]

To my eyes the solution is less acceptable at least in the lower part of the pyramid.
The edge on the top part looks more convincing.Ideal would be a mix of the steps in
desert-2J and the upper edges of the latter ones.Although the shapes of the steps
in the middle might be considered as not likely on a pyramid by some they could
easily pass as some kind of inner structure I think.

inkydigit - now that you got aware of that option (building pyramids with SSSs) you
               could go one step further and build a small village,a stretched pyramid
               for the roof and displ offset,for example,to get the body of the house.
               There are lots of possibilities.

[Dune]

It's not hard to make a 'new' pyramid, just use a displaced SSS and a local strata shader. No need for stacking SSS's. But to get some worn parts without the straight corners is the hard part.

[Tangled-Universe]

Nice work once again Ulco

Thanks, Hannes. I changed the color somewhat. There's one problem still. Can anyone tell me? And I'd like to be able to influence the widt of the strata steps, but I think that's impossible with the current strata shader, I'd need to use a fancy step function (blues).

That's intrinsic to how the strata shader works.

If you set:
hard layer depth @ 2 metres
hard layer steepness @ 4
plateau buildup @ 1
hard layer spacing @ 2
octaves to 0

Then you will get flat steps, 2 metres wide and 2 metres tall.

Now here's the tricky thing about the shader:
You can't tell to keep the steps 2 metres tall and to have them be more wide, simply because that would create less number of 2 metres tall steps and thus you won't be able to stratify the pyramid to the top.

That's why it's inherently linked, to preserve the vertical span of the terrain as much as possible. Otherwise you would need to flatten the terrain.
(increased size of strata only offsets terrain vertically, but basically preserves the min to max altitude values of the terrain).

[inkydigit]

if we could have rounded cornered squares/rectangles that would be super!

[Tangled-Universe]

I remember my Dutch Landscape and Winter Sunrise images also used simple shape shaders to create the irrigation channels and I also had hard edges there.
So I tried painting a simple shape in Photoshop and blur it so that the edges didn't show up, but that was damn hard somehow, so it would be nice to have this some day.

Ulco discussed it here before and there's a tech-savy solution:
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,14493.0.html

[Dune]

Yes, every once in a while you hit a brick wall, and have to find a solution.

By the way, the plateau build up doesn't have any influence with these settings (which were indeed about my settings).

[Tangled-Universe]

That's likely because the steepness is maxed out.
If the steepness isn't max then the plateau buildup setting will cause a flat level plateau at high numbers and otherwise, depending on the steepness it will create a ramp towards the principle layer.

The 3DArtDirect webinar session package of my session contains a detailed description of the strata & outcrops shader.

[Dune]

Never followed your webinar session, sorry.

[Tangled-Universe]

Ghehe don't feel sorry Ulco
The webinar session wasn't meant for users like you who have a motherload of experience.