The Secret of Smudge?

I used Smudge in a few things but don't truly understand it. I am playing with a 'greebely' type filter but having a hard time understanding what inputs will get me nice well defined blocks and elevation. I saw the 'noise buildings' filter and he seemed to get great height and flat tops. My results sometimes are good and sometimes not but laregely just chance and tweaking until something happens. So I am trying to 'raise' a simple square (attached). Can someone explain or show me a simple example of how to convert this into a simple, well defined (sharp angled) cube?

Hopefully the dumbed down explanation will allow me to apply it better.

Thanks.

smudge.ffxml

Thanks for the sample. I'm going through it now. I'm going to have to explore the Lookup component a lot more too it seems. Thank you.

[PS. Just noticed those disconnected controls were used to add instruction for me - thansk for that detail]

I have a followup question to this if anyone cares to answer and if it is possible. I am trying to use the basic operation from the file posted by ThreeDee above, but want to generate additional objects - say with the polygon tool- and then use the output from the Lookup component to smudge and then correctly orient these new objects so that they can be stacked on the original smudge results. So in the example above we have one cube, can a second or even a third smaller cube be stacked on top (something like this image) using the output of the existing Lookup component so as to use only one Smudge operation?



Thanks.

Thanks for the response ThreeDee. Not exactly what I meant. It is a heightmap but correct me if I am wrong, the total max height of the 3 cubes will be the same as the total max height of 1 cube - white represents some sort of constant maximum height is that right? I want to build higher -so these buildings I might want to add an antenna or a cooling tower, or a gun turret looking things. So I want to do the max, then do it again and combine.

With Max Trail set at 100, you can get the height all the way to the top of the image (Unless you touch the "Size, pixels" slider). It's not totally clean and you start losing small details, but it does work.

smudge 3.ffxml

Yes, when done this way -- i.e. by Smudging the coordinate system for the Lookup component (those two gradients that are fed into the X and Y inputs of the Lookup), you can use the result for any number of image sources.

One Smudge to rule them all.

smudge 3A.ffxml

Well looks like I will be playing with this for a while so I uploaded the most basic version to the Snippets section of the Library -before I make changes and break it.

I attached a copy of the filter and do have more Smudgy questions if anyone cares to answer - don't want to abuse.

Right now the filter won't save a non-square image correctly - 600h x 1200w. I removed the one Rotation component because of what I read about Orthagonal view and it gets a little closer but still not right - besides I hate to lose the various angles but maybe that is unavoidable? I tried setting the various components XY Achor to Image Bounds thinking that might be to blame but the image then looks like a mountain range - all the 'city' definition is gone.

My only thought is maybe I can 'trick' it by making a 1200 x1200 image then somehow doing a crop somehow before the render so the output image is 600x1200 (or 1200x600 never remeber which goes first).

Thoughts?

Greebleville.ffxml

Thanks for looking into this. I can't open the file - need newer version. Are you using the 4.0 Beta? I can recreate it using what byou said though so no worries. Thanks again.