Thread: [Award Winner] Thatching for dummies...

That script works fantastically well, thanks Rob!

Toff: The city is an experiment with positive and negative space. The reason why some of the spaces look like buildings is because they use the same basic shapes I've used for the buildings but carved out of the buildings. Long way to go before I get the right shapes but it's still in 'experimental' stage.

Cheers

Ravs

I haven't tried your script but it seems to be working pretty well based on the sample pics. I am using either 8 or 16 angles in mine too. If the pattern is pretty symmetrical then I do two light sources at a time but if the pattern is different on different sides of the roof then I go with the 16. In my city block renderings I discovered that you cant see any detail anyway so for overlapping tiles there's no point in doing the full 16. Still in a quandary about how to actually make the most from these scripts tho. Really its better to texture each house one by one and stamp them down and just use the shading for getting the sun angle and shadow right. For thatching and tiling complex shapes its the mutts nuts but for doing a whole city in one go it seems less effective. We still need an auto generating way of getting height map buildings into a drawn road mapped mask - then I think the thatching et al scripts would be very cool.

Yeah. The script works well, but much is lost at the city level. It works best on individual buildings or a few blocks.

The real trick, as you say, is creatinf the heightfield. I either use the angular shapeburst or a carve script I wrote than can leave a heightfield.

-Rob A>

I discovered a while ago that if you dont use the entire 255 range of white for the height field then you can sum up bits of towers and stuff using a stamp type program like ViewingDale. Say you have a clear PNG which is all white but the alpha is 0-64 then you can stamp up to 4 of these on top one another and put a tower on a barbican or whatever so I am wondering if its possible to use... now who was it... saganlichts ??? script to put down square houses but instead of ensuring that they don't overlap just let it rip an overlap them so that it builds up bits of house. Hmm not clear that - gimme a few secs...

There, thats two thousands words right there. See what you get when you thatch the first image.

EDIT -- Mneh thats not at all convincing either is it.

Here is an article about some smart archeologist who is looking for medieval thatch in surviving buildings. He apparently has found over 200 sources of medieval thatch remains from which they are getting all sorts of food and farming info.

http://www.britarch.ac.uk/ba/ba58/feat1.shtml

The article is called 'Living under a medieval field'.

From the article

"These base coats contain the best preserved late medieval cereal remains ever recovered in western Europe, and include complete ears with intact grain and straw, as well as crop weeds and other vegetables."


Sigurd

Originally Posted by Redrobes

I discovered a while ago....
Say you have a clear PNG which is all white but the alpha is 0-64 then you can stamp up to 4 of these on top one another and put a tower ...

Yeah it is a nice idea use kind of a stamp or maybe a (PhotoShop-) brush to stamp the roof of buildings. With a dynamic brush this maybe will also significantly simplify the placement and could add a bit randome like size and direction to the roof highfield. As you show in your example.
Now to the other Idea I got reading this tread. How about use the method we try to develop in here for mountain ranges? Making/painting highfields with a brush or stamp which contain the gray picture of a Julia-Set. Painting with the stamp-picture with direction and size variations as well as overlapping (like in Redrobes example picture done with normal squares) rows of mountains (maybe it would also be adaptable for cliffs and similar rocky slopes). After this preparation run the thatching script over it with kind of a matching rock-like material map selected.
Anyone would like to try that and show the results? If that get interesting maybe we can fork to a new thread for that.

That's an interesting idea. Though rock on a cliff does not have a pattern on it that is very direction dependent I think it could be used to put say vines on it. Also it could be used for fortifications or even on an atlas style map to show patterns for height stuff like cliffs, cuttings and embankments.

A long while ago in the Dec 07 challenge I dropped lots of rock height maps down and then shaded the total in the cave system and that worked pretty well so I think the idea of stamped height maps is a goer.

It would be cool to think of 1 step of alpha being 1ft height then you can have up to 250ft or so height buildings but you can have them made in parts and put them on each other and then render out the result. If it weren't for lighting and shadows then you could just drop the stamps down and forget the height maps but to get a nice city shadow you need them all consistent so maybe I am swaying back to using height maps and a big thatching script rather than making individual houses.

For me the problem has now shifted from being able to tile/thatch it to how to get this height map of a city made. If anyone has a topo laser scan / LIDAR scan of buildings as a height map we can try that would be very cool. I know they exist, I just don't have one handy to try.

But back to original point - yes, wherever you have direction dependent patterns this script is potentially useful.

heres a link to that Dec 07 thread.
December Entry: Pirate Caverns - The old lighthouse

The big image has been removed but since I still have it here's a section of it below showing the shaded rubble.

Originally Posted by Redrobes

wherever you have direction dependent patterns this script is potentially useful.

Which is exactly why my n,s,e,w idea won't work. It doesn't take all those various directions into account.

Yeah but both myself and Robs script are using 16 directions which is still limited to 22.5 deg angles. If you get a square building at some funny angle the roof tiles can be up to 11 degrees out so it can look a little odd even then. We could do more angles but you need more processing to do it. Ideally you want to snap the angle for the buildings to 22.5 degrees and use house height maps that don't have long runs of odd angled bits of roof.

Theres an option in my app to spray down stamps at random angles but I might have to add an option to snap that angle to a value so that you can set 45 or 22.5 or whatever. That might be useful.