Blurry Voronoi structure with constant height/cell line color wanted

[sebastianzander]

Hello, I am pretty new to Substance Designer. I followed a lot of tutorials (many on Pluralsight and some from Allegorithmic on YouTube) but I can't figure out how to achieve the following. I also hope that this is the right forum or that my question is of the right kind for this forum:

I basically want to achieve the following look:


These are sand dunes on Mars (Marias Pass)

This is what I have to far:




For this I use the Cells 1 generator. I like that there is a soft blurry transition between the ridges/crests and the troughs. My problem is that the height of the ridges varies a lot, leading to very unpleasant looking tessellation with very few sharp edges (see second render) - not just in SD but also in Unity. I thought about leveling and clamping, but that would create some unwanted plateaus. I also thought about using the Cells 2 generator:



and trying to blend together several layers of blurred versions to achieve a similar look to Cells 1, but with a more (what I would call) constant height so that the cell walls/lines have a similar dark color.

Could somebody please help me and tell me what might be the best approach in this case? Thanks in advance!

Sebastian

[Esger van der Post]

Using the highpass node may be a step in the right direction. And you can use an autolevels to safely clamp values.

A highpass essentially removes the large height variations while preserving the smaller ones.

As for stacking blurs, the non-uniform blur does this in a certain sense. I tried using a setup like this:

This didn't give very nice results but perhaps you can still use it somehow.

I've attached the .sbs with both methods.

[sebastianzander]

Using the highpass node may be a step in the right direction. And you can use an autolevels to safely clamp values.
[image removed]
A highpass essentially removes the large height variations while preserving the smaller ones.

Thank you very much for hinting me towards the highpass node. I managed to blend together two threads coming from the same Cell 1 node but with different highpass filter and levels. I am not one hundred percent happy with the result, because now the dune ridges are somewhat softer. But for now it works.

Does anybody know if it is possible to create a custom Voronoi cell generator?

[divi.cig]

it is certainly possible, but what kind of result would you expect that the already existing cell gens don't give you?

[sebastianzander]

it is certainly possible, but what kind of result would you expect that the already existing cell gens don't give you?

I would pursue the reverse approach in terms of height development. Cells 1 seems to start from a constant white base value (that is the center of each cell is white) and develop towards black (1-) depending on the random points distances. Since some points are closer to each other than others, the height of the ridges is variable. The reverse approach would be to start from a constant black height value (the ridges) and develop towards white (0+). As a result the height of those troughs (the depths of the sand dunes in my example) would be variable.

Could it be possible to achieve that with Cells 2 and the Distance node somehow?

[Luca Giarrizzo]

Hello,

The Distance node is a nice intuition, the Bevel node can prove to be an interesting alternative as it provides a 'Corner Type: Round' option to deal with angles between individual slopes.
From there, the 'Curve' node will provide further control over the slopes.

Playing around a bit with Cells 2, a Bevel with a control Curve and Non-Uniform Blur, this is a rough idea of what can be done:





I hope this can provide helpful pointers.

@Eggfruit : High Pass is a clever approach!

Best regards,
Luca Giarrizzo