René WIP.

[Hetzen]

Looks great Rene. No displacement 'fins'. Really well controlled.

[René]

how many compute terrains do you need?

If you start with large displacements with no roughness and work from there to smaller ones with more roughness, you don't really need any compute terrains. I do almost all displacements with shaders and keep the terrain is as simple as possible.

[zaxxon]

Good insight into your technique, thanks. Pretty much the same proven process as sculpting or painting, start with the large areas and work down to the finer details.

[René]

Good insight into your technique, thanks. Pretty much the same proven process as sculpting or painting, start with the large areas and work down to the finer details.

Exactly! 

[Dune]

No compute normals either? For 'regular' lateral displacements you need one at least, unless you work with redirects, vector displacements, or fake stones, which I do mostly too. It's a bit harder if you need to use a minimum slope for something like textures, but that too can be overcome by overlaying textures with maximum slope restraint.
And too many vector displacements also take up render time, so one compute normal or compute terrain and using lateral/normal displacement might yield the same speed. It's an interesting playfield anyway, trying to get maximum result with minimum nodes and speed.

[mhaze]

I have two compute terrains, endless displacements and complex masking! takes about 40 mins to render add in veg another half hour add in two small trickles of water which have to have transparency to work and render time rockets to 13.33 hrs!

[René]

I also didn't use any compute normal. As you can see in the picture the terrain is very steep. The only displacement shader is a strata shader. I did use 'use world space (final position') for all shaders to avoid stretching.

[René]

You can also use a surface shader to straighten(even after texturing) the terrain even more: limit by altitude and lateral displacement offset

[Dune]

As far as I know the lateral displacement offset is not working as a mask (lateral displacement needs a compute normal anyway), but I have to check out what you exactly did here (maybe you found some secret I didn't know yet  ). I do know that you can stretch by altitude offset and/or slope limit. You can also use smoothing effect with a minus number, btw.

[AndyWelder]

I'm learning a lot here! Thank you, René & Ulco!

[René]

As far as I know both lateral displacement only -and normalized work fine without a compute normal. It may be that things are lost in translation,  so I will get back to this when this contest is over. If I forget, don't hesitate to remind me.

[Dune]

Yes, we have to sort this out, because why otherwise does it say; compute normal needed? Fake stones have an inbuilt 'normal calculation' as far as I can tell, hence the possibility to use those for the lateral displacements without compute normal/terrain.

[Hannes]

This is interesting!! Looks great!

[cyphyr]

Hmm, I find that the compute normal is needed for true lateral displacements although not for Vector displacements. Often a normal displacement can look just as effective as a lateral and render cheaper!
Sometimes adding in a texture coordinates XYZ can help too.
Good canyon you got going on there.

[Dune]

Rendering cheaper? Never noticed that actually, but if that's so, it's good to know. Yes, I tend to use one compute normal at least, as it's easier then to get nice laterals. VDisp is always slanting one way, unless you make a mix, but that takes time too. And my latest experiments didn't quite yield what I wanted. And XYZ's I use quite a lot.