First progress on the urban parts.
Some artisan guilds are thought to have occupied compounds with shared spaces, which would have been situated around the city centers and the major causeways.
I made a procedural generator in Geometry Nodes based on super basic geometry.
I made a few variants like this, which are scattered procedurally again in the city.
Up until now, I never tested to see if my renders actually match photographs, like, if everything is in the correct place.
Looks like it is 
Was a bit of a hassle to get the images to line up, but here it is:
( would be cool if BlenderArtists had some sort of image slider functionality 
)
Finally: rivers
Simply a spline with some geo nodes and a shader.
The river lays on top of the terrain, but that’s good enough for this.
You are a magician. I’m amazed at what you have done.
Trying out a bit of polychrome to the Tlatelolco temple complex.
The actual amount of color is up for speculation (though most contemporary drawings seem to match something like this - mostly white with sime colors here and there)
Fleshing out Tlatelolco more.
Many elements still lack definition, but put together, they work quite ok. From a distance, at least.
Still much to be done.
There were many smaller ceremonial / administrative / trading places around, so I’ll try to work out a few next to see what happens.
The past few weeks have been filled with research and discussion, with not much to show for it yet.
I’ve been gently blocking out the center of Tenochtitlan, starting with the palaces and then working out the religious precinct.
Looking forwards to detailing the palaces, like model-building 
So, now after having stalked this thread for so long, I too have to give my five cents.
This is an amazing project, and I admire your attention to detail - and your attention span! Unfortunately for me, I don’t have the patience for projects of that scale and loose interest relatively fast if I cannot produce a decent concept in time. But you have been going strong for months, posting results and process insights, and this is both entertaining and education.
I raise my hat to you, good Sir, and will continue enjoying your progress!
Thanks for the kind words 
It helps that the topic is really interesting.
About 30% of my time so far is spent doing research, reading papers and books, and talking to experts.
There have been times were I considered giving up, because something just wasn’t working out and I was afraid I had bitten of more than I could chew.
It’s important to keep a positive but realistic attitude in these cases, and find something else to focus on.
Often times I would have the solution to a problem ready by the time I came back to it.
I must admit that it is a long haul, but with most of the city done, and only the urban aspects to go, I think the project is slowly nearing completion.
Incredible work!!! Not only the technical ability, but also the research put into it.
Congratulations!
Here’s the process of detailing a palace.
I posted before about using geometry nodes to detail buildings.
I worked out this system a bit to be a bit more complex for palaces.
The left shows just how simple the input geo is.
All texturing is procedural, too.
Since there is very little archeological evidence on these palaces, I have to make do with historical mentions and old maps. There’s really not much to go on, which is frustrating, but it does allow for a lot of creative freedom I suppose.
Clouds have been a constant struggle with this project.
Getting a good quality/speed tradeoff has proven to be difficult.
Here’s the problem:
Volumetrics quality is based on two factors: Step Rate, and Max Steps, both found under Render Settings.
Shape contour contrast is determined by Step Rate. Higher step rates means the volume marching “steps over” details in your shape, leaving them fuzzy.
Max Steps determines how many steps are taken through a volume before it just “gives up” and ignores the rest.
This has huge implications for performance, as higher quality means much higher render times.
This was an early test using a volumetric shader:
And this is a more recent test, using an actual texture directly as a volume:
Both look not so good. The low quality settings leave the first clouds shapeless, the second one is more defined but looks wrong at certain times of day.
I decided to tackle this problem once and for all™, using a new setup.
I think I have something here that works fairly well, let me show:
This is a single volume shader with just one musgrave node, with some stuff around it.
As you can see, the render quality has a bigger impact than just quality - the overall density of the cloud is lowered. I can’t seem to correct for this.
| HQ | LQ | |
|---|---|---|
| Step Rate | 0.5 | 1.0 |
| Max Steps | 16 | 8 |
| Material Step Rate | 0.01 | 0.1 |
To manage these settings, I added scene properties that drive these values.
Besides quality, I can also control other settings.
Coverage: How much do the clouds cover?
Thickness: How much do the clouds “pile up”? Higher = more stacks of clouds.
Most settings require some tweaking, to get the correct result. A high coverage + low thickness results in a nice “blanket”, where as low coverage + high thickness gets you “sky mountains”
More testing to follow.
Nice! Can we see the nodes for this?
Yeah, but they don’t make much sense without the rest of the context.
I’ll see if I can turn this into its own post when I have the time.
I’m always having a blast looking at your progress ! Super cool, motivational and informative !
Genius! You’re really getting me to think outside of comfort zone.
i think i can say that most of us have super short attention spans, and you and this project is insanely inspirational.
im particularly enjoying the large scale renders, with those unique details like the wave and wind textures on the water
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