Objects - Exposing Faces??

[WAS]

I'm trying to understand, when you're adding small low level displacement to an object, for material purposes, why in some scenarios, it will expose the faces of the object? I've had this a couple times when working with a PF and dispalcement in default shader, and I can't seem to remedy it without just creating a new PF and starting from scratch.

I was hoping to understand what causes it better so I can avoid it. I was theorizing that somehow the displacement is pushed "lower" than the geometry of the object, thus contouring the faces and vertices?

Edit: Low and behold, it may be so hard to figure out because somehow it's the colour diffuse PFs effecting the objects geometry, not displacement (Default Shader). What? Now, I'm even further lost in confusion.

Ehh, so it seems to be caused by masking the surface layer used to mask some of the reflection. Without masking it is fine. If I mask the reflection it shows the faces of the object (or just broken up reflection).

I tried upping ray detail multiplier, and reflection quality but doesn't effect it. I also thought maybe the PF was too soft and there were artifacts, so I made it as rough as a default PF and that didn't help either. So not sure. Is this just a issue with masking reflections?

[Dune]

Your second crossed (why crossed?) line indeed seems to be the case. I've had this too a year ago or something and Matt explained that by bumping the calculation of light is distorted by the 'lower or higher' locations of the vertices in relation to original. If I translate correctly. You may be able to offset this; if bump is 0.01, then offset by -0.005 and see if that helps. 
I assume smooth normals is checked.

[WAS]

Your second crossed (why crossed?) line indeed seems to be the case. I've had this too a year ago or something and Matt explained that by bumping the calculation of light is distorted by the 'lower or higher' locations of the vertices in relation to original. If I translate correctly. You may be able to offset this; if bump is 0.01, then offset by -0.005 and see if that helps. 
I assume smooth normals is checked.

I tried this. Indeed removing displacement all together and the same problem still exists, only disappearing when unmasking the reflection. Which is odd, not present on the rusty brass with literally same duplicated reflection, which is also masked without anomalies.

[Dune]

And taking it through Poseray to re-calculate smooth normals?

[WAS]

And taking it through Poseray to re-calculate smooth normals?

I actually did this when I scale it for TG in poseray (As it was about the size of the moon originally). Before that I even gave it more subdivision in Blender as I noticed some vertices.. Additionally not a problem with other objects. Only certain scenarios it pops up and I'm left to literally rebuild the whole shader from scratch. I originally though it was the softness of the mask, producing shapes. As it was originally smoothed with the smooth shader, which in some instances can produces square smoothing when dealing with a lot of mixed/merged shaders.

Let me bundle the shader ball as a TGO. It's completely free and shareable so no issue there.

[WAS]

Here is a version using only the reflection and basic mask. Pretty sure that was a 20mb object that TG makes a 5MB object, than further compressed by RAR to 1mb. Pretty impressive. Oh wait, Blender to Poseray version is actually 13mb compared to blenders 20mb export.

Was able to sorta fix this by simply NOT having the mask hit absolute zero (Black Point: -0.1 - -0.25). Not sure if this is a new issue or always been there but hidden because of small scales.

So to wrap up, when you mask reflections in a surface, if there is absolute black in your mask (high contrast) it will sorta distort the reflection/model in some form or another. Without the high contrast the problem was remedied. Can still sorta see anomalies.

[Matt]

This might be caused by "distort by normal" on one of your fractals. It was designed for terrains and doesn't work well on objects at the moment.

[WAS]

This might be caused by "distort by normal" on one of your fractals. It was designed for terrains and doesn't work well on objects at the moment.

No distort by normals in use, though I did try that for the matt brass shader, but like you said it's not meant for objects and kinda embedded the displacement.

The problem here is only present when masking a reflection surface layer. I had to soften the reflection mask until the artifacting was barely noticeable. No mask and no artifacts.