The other, other procedural generation thing going on this November is #nodevember, a node-based procedural challenge for technical artists. Using only basic primitives and procedural generation, they try to make something that matches the theme of the day.
Most of the people participating are using procedural shaders but that’s not a strict requirement. Just making a procedural something and tagging your post about it with #nodevember.
Like I mentioned in Gelatinous Cube in a Dungeon, the second ‘quick scene’ immediately got well out of hand, ballooning into some cyberpunkish shopping arcade that I made the mistake of making one wall a giant window, and having a giant window I needed a cityscape beyond it; so went my addled reasoning. Further over ambitious thoughts lead me to thinking “I can node my way out of this” and to an extent I can, randomly scattering some vaguely buildingish shape about the place isn’t too hard, and making materials for the buildings ends up resulting in something that I’m pretty happy with.
So I’ve broken it out and thrown together a quick scene to display it.
What I’m trying to replicate here is the look of a window into a lit room at night, where there’s some main lighting, and maybe some other lighting that’s a different colour temperature, and there’s indistinct patches of shadow suggesting occupants or maybe some furniture.
It basically some soft, distorted, noise driving a colour mix between a 2000k and 8000k blackbody colour node, that drive the Emission channel; with a couple of noise textures and a Musgrave texture being mathed together to drive the Emission Strength channel.
I’ve attached a shot of the whole node tree below the fold (now I know I can make a fold).
Some Time to Forget
Coming back to this project file after about six months to pull out the city windows material, I’ve found that whatever the image I had in my head for it at the time that overwhelmed me has died away to a dull roar, and I’ve actually managed to make some headway including a nifty geometry nodes system for generating the railings.
Where I stalled at is on the left, and my progress is on the right; now if only I knew what that vaguely church looking thing I’ve made at the end of the corridor is so I know how to detail it, but hey, one step at a time.
Shader Nodes for the city windows material below the fold.
