Generating natural Arches with code

Arches like these:



I study mathematics and computer science at research university, and I'm know Perlin (/Simplex) noise and fractal noise, and...
STILL I can't seem to get arches like these procedurally generated.

Anyone has any ideas how to do this? I've come up with many tricks but they all give very boring results. Long running time is no problem (long programming time is, a bit, haha).

I don't mind whether the solution works on infinite or finite terrain.

Dibs for every tip you give

 

Generating with a command or natually?

if its natural you will need to rebuild/make a terrain generator

 

I get that XD I'm asking for tricks on how to do it technically, the actual generation bit. How to mathematically define those arches or algorithmically produce them. Sorry for fancy words

 

Muizers
I'm not sure how you would generate them with a terrain generator. But arches like that are manually made with a plugin called Voxel Sniper.

 

I've actually just started working on a generator myself. In my early tests I got lots of shapes like those completely by accident from unaltered 3d simplex generation. It shouldn't be too hard to achieve via a smallish scale/higher frequency setting, and setting a relatively low threshold for which values give you blocks.

If you haven't come across this already, then i assume you are using a 2d height map? In which case, you need to switch to a 3d density based one.

 

Ah, finally a reply to my question!

Yes I've tried this in many ways, also in combination with Perlin worms, but I can't seem to get nice arches (only really weird broken ones, SOMETIMES nice ones) and the thing I really don't like are the floating rocks you get with 3D noise. If you've come across anything that makes these floating rocks unfrequent,but keeps arch-like structures, that'd be awesome.

Actually, have a pic?

Yeah exactly, I've been using Voxel Sniper too it works great. But yeah I'm looking for a terrain generation-ish way.

EDIT by Moderator: merged posts, please use the edit button instead of double posting.

 

Yeah, floating rocks are problematic, one of the things I am yet to tackle in my generator, although I have largely got rid of them, they still occur with some settings I am hoping to use. The trick to making the 3d noise useful is to modify your resulting density value using the height of the block, meaning you get something nearer to flat terrain, rather than floating mess. However, doing that greatly reduces any chance of getting features like those arches, and indeed, I no longer get arches very often. 'Fraid I don't have any screenshots from back when I was getting them and don't have any old copies of the code.

 

Jep exactly that, and I've also tried using 2d height-map with just a little bit of influence of 3d noise, and this gives no floating rocks (very Minecraft-normal like terrain) but absolutely no arches either it's hard I guess.

 

Muizers You could check out these guides, they're pretty informational: http://forums.bukkit.org/threads/th...ation-part-one-prerequisites-and-setup.93982/

 

I skipped all the tutorials, but in the end there is indeed some interesting code by codename_B (I hope I'm allowed to tag )
Not what I was expecting but it could be a start, thanks!