Trying out the farmland generation in the Moyotlan district.
From far away it looks ok-ish
But up close it’s kind of lifeless.
I haven’t found a good workflow yet for creating the city layout.
I’m just kind of hand-drawing the layout like this:
Then I turn it into a b/w image like this, and trace it in inkscape.
This is obviously a huge bottleneck, when I want to change the layout of the city I have to go through the whole chain.
Does anyone have a good idea?
Randomized Aztec architecture in Geometry Nodes 
It’s just some curves and profiles, but it works well. Now I can mass produce noble houses.
I have to add a bit more variation, but it’s a start!
Hey !
That’s an awesome project ! Thanks a lot to share your progress and the trickery behind all this , that’s really inspiring !
@sozap
Thanks! Means a lot coming form a geonodes wizard.
It’s certainly a “doing more with less” kind of project.
Been working more on the layout, which is a tough nut to crack.
I found some resources about the more fine details of the layout, and it’s helped me put things together.
It still looks like pastures though, instead of crop fields, so I’ll work on that next
Hey ! you’ve got awesome deep node wizardry too !
Looks really tricky to manage details so it looks right even if it’s really small in the final image…
I’m really looking forward how it will turn out !
I think I have something for the farms.
Doesn’t look too great up close, but works well enough from a distance
Fantastic idea!
I have also wanted to do this, too! I admire your drive to make it happen. It is a very ambitious project. Good luck, have fun and share your progress!
@Moonapali Thanks for the words of encouragement.
Laying out another quarter of the city.
The larger plots of land are something I still have to work on, they are not chinampas, but some were probably farmland. Not sure what to do with them yet.
Actually redoing the layout again, as I wasn’t happy with how messy it turned out. Using the actual layout of Mexico City this time, which is giving me nice consistent results.
Parts are still messy, but it’s on the right track I think. In the center would have been more “urban” parts, which I tried to just put over the chinampas but it doesn’t work, it’s clear those parts need separate “grounds”
Super cool ! This is really convincing !
Well done ! following this thread is a pure pleasure !
Some more shoreline work, this time with the little islands worked out as well.
I was really insecure about how the water and land would meet, but I think it’s coming together!
Filling in some more details.
It’s fun populating these little towns using geometry nodes, although I was running into a bug:
Lots of geonodes (the causeways, the towns, standalone trees) stick to the ground using raycasts.
I replaced the raycast with a texture lookup (the same texture that is used by the terrain for height) and I was able to circumvent the bug.
Next up I think I should work on the water shading. The distortion is a bit too chaotic, while also being too homogeneous.
I had a hard time reconciling the fake trees (billboards) with the even faker trees (from the trick posted earlier).
At 12:00, the light shines form the top, illuminating the terrain trees maximally, but at sunset/sunrise, the billboards would be illuminated maximally.
What I did is create a driver which take the sun rotation and use a dotproduct to create a value from 0 to 1 that represents how high the sun is in the sky. 0 would be night, 1 would be noon. I use it to drive the color of the trees, which is incorrect but looks good enough.
Now the trees don’t seem to glow at sunrise / sunset.
I really adore the effort you put in that project and I enjoy all the “little” tricks! The result is already looking really convincing! You can nearly hear the people chatter on the marketplaces and the shouts of the ferrymen in the distance!
Took a little break, here’s a wip of the market at Tlatelolco
It’s not surrounded by city yet, that comes later.
People and stall placement using geo nodes, of course.
