Thanks guys
A new iteration is in the making, hope to post some soon!
Richard: Thanks, glad you like it. I agree with your suggestion to cover the implementation of fake stones into recent projects. I'll try to explain that as clear as possible.
The fun thing with this setup is that you'll only need to connect just one single surface layer into your current network to have the fake stones there. There are some conditions of course, but like I told you I'll try to cover these all.
Frank: Hey thanks dude
I know what you mean, but it's not easy to prevent it completely. There might be a trick to solve it entirely, but haven't figured that out yet. So far I'm trying to avoid it using the correct blend-mode in the merge-shader and by carefully tweaking the density for each layer.
Jan: The stones on top of each other can look nice in some ways. Though like Frank mentions it sometimes can look odd as well. Perhaps also a matter of taste, although the "natural" way would be that most of the stones are separated. I used the normal fake stones shader, so no blue node wizardry
Dom: good point you make which I haven't covered in my starting post. I've designed these stones mainly for this type of view but also more close-up. I'll include these when I'll post my next iteration. I'll see if I can make this shader work from a greater distance, but there's no guarantee. I'd need to make some adjustments and include that shaderset as a separate stone shader into the package.
The reason why the smaller stones tend to look less angular, although I disagree they really do, is because of the displacement-scale and amplitude. It's very likely that a small stone will have very low variation of displacement-scale and same goes for displacement amplitude. You'll have a very evenly displaced stone then.
Cheers,
Martin