This was my ‘could’ goal so I have not prioritised the geometry nodes city but I’ve managed to complete it for the film. The idea was to create a huge city that distorted and moved, representing AI’s destructive perspective and Tracy’s loss of control
In order to make a city that moved, first I had to make a city. by using the Instance on Points node, I was able to randomly disperse various buildings I had modelled on a definable scale. This was relatively easy, and so I began trying to make them move. The buildings were not moving as I wanted, but I was able to use animate the height of the buildings so they moved up and down in waves. I am excited by how good I think this looks
By multiplying each axis by the value of the Z axis, I was able to ensure the foundations/base of the buildings were immobile and began to move increasingly as the buildings went up. To remove the bias towards a certain axis, I realised the solution was to map the noise texture from -1 to 1 as the noise texture gives results of 0 to 1 which was creating the lopsided motion. I tried many node setups before realising this.
A major problem with the isntances on points method so far was the randomness of the distribution. Massive modern cities generally follow fixed layouts, and all cities have clearly defined roads. I began to experimetn with different ways to create these layouts. I started by defining vertexes i wanted to be streets on the main city plane, but then discovered that using the ‘brick’ node made the city more scalable and controllable procedually