I’ve been quietly watching this thread for aw while… Really top-notch work. I just wish I understood your process. It’s amazing.
3 Likes
Thanks @Mark06GT , I appreciate it : )
I’m redoing the city layout again, as I was not quite happy with it.
I’ve tried to reconstruct it from various academic resources, written accounts, and old maps.
By warping the 1628 (“only” 100 years after the fall of Tenochtitlan) map onto a more modern (1811 and newer ones), I think I have got a somewhat decent idea of what the city might have looked like. Now I’m filling in the details using grease pencil.
7 Likes
The Tlatelolco sacred precinct is beginning to take shape.
I’m using my “dirtyness” trick almost everywhere, nothing is UV’d
10 Likes
Working on the layout of Tlatelolco, if I have that worked out I can start to incorporate the sacred precinct and the market into the rest of the environment.
9 Likes
This is really cool! I’m actually doing the same, though I’m just revamping the Sketchfab model of the city center I’m sure you’ve seen. I wish I could tackle the surrounding area like this… But I’m hosting the environment on Mozilla Hubs which cannot handle anything like that.
Took a big break over the summer, back into it now.
Working on giving the waters to the east of the island a more shallow look, as that seems accurate.
Also, for the first time, the entire island is mapped out. Not a fan yet of the look of the overall island, it’s too homogeneous. I’ll work on that next.
15 Likes
First steps towards repopulating the island.
Just some noise won’t do, I noticed, so I started making some masks to control things.
For now just tree size, but I want to do other things too, like house type (poor, middle, noble) and such.
I think it already looks a bit more organic.
6 Likes
I’m surprised by the effectiveness of these cirrus clouds.
Just a cirrus cloud texture slapped onto a flattened half dome, with a volume material.
Works in any time of day, too.
13 Likes
Wow, that water is looking amazing! Top notch work.
2 Likes
Funny you say that, I’m was not happy at all yet with the water.
I added some better large-scale details, in the shape of wind streaks.
I used the normalmap of the terrain to gently distort the wind streak texture (which is actually the cirrus clouds texture), and I think it looks nice now. I think it really adds a sense of scale.
13 Likes
Even better. Very clever using the cloud texture.
2 Likes
Redoing my texture for all the individual plots of land.
It’s a combination of procedural and handmade, as most of the project.
Which of the 18 rows it picks is based on a combination of:
- distance from a big road (wealthy/poor)
- neighborhood ID (handpainted map)
- randomness
This gives a natural look with some overarching structure to it.
You won’t ever see it with this few trees, but just to show what it looks like:
15 Likes
Higher resolution version of last render.
I think my farmlands are ready, now I have to move on to the urban plots of land, with more houses on them. Quite a few of the plots of land visible in this shot would be less farm-y and more garden-y.
12 Likes
First of all, kudos! The project looks amazing! I was wondering if you could elaborate a bit on the dome and the cirrus clouds. Looks like quite an interesting technique. Thank you in advance!
Here’s a solid view of the last shot:
This is what I mean with the cirrus clouds setup:
Just a big flattened dome around the scene, with a clouds texture.
The dome itself has a shallow solidify modifier applied to it, so that it works well with a volume shader.
It’s really just a cloud texture, I just add some noise to it to hide the lack of resolution.
7 Likes
Low sample test render of the more urban bits of the island. No farmland on those plots, just houses (and maybe some trees later).
Now I have stone/brick houses → loam houses → wooden houses.
Because it’s all geometrynodes, I can just slide one value and make the different types of houses take up more or less of the island.
6 Likes
Two new shots, trying to recreate an angle from earlier, but with the city more complete
And another:
I decided to get a new GPU (1070 → 3070) (well, second hand, but new to me)
I felt like render times were hindering me a lot.
They have improved so much, sometimes more than 4x.
Any feedback is always welcome 
13 Likes
Worked on some trees.
I started out with some trees that I bought,
Like this one on Artstation,
and used Geometry Nodes to bend them to my will
I was able to create fairly believable Ahuejote’s, and even a Ahuehuete.
Then I baked them down. The Ahuejote is made up of two perpendicular cards, the Ahuehuete is a bit more complicated.
Not perfect, but good enough for my usecase.
7 Likes
Trying out some hybrid cloud method
I changed the anisotropy of the atmosphere (after being scared of this bug for a while: https://developer.blender.org/T96153)
Looks a lot more lively this time, and I think I actually managed to speed up rendering a bit while changing stuff around.
9 Likes
