So this has taught me to be more careful when deciding to use fake stones.
Fake stones seem to work best in conventional scenes, those that don't have a lot of extreme displacements or surface shear. It's easy to quickly set up several layers of different sizes and avoid overlaps with merge/use highest. Surfaces are easy to shade, displace and randomize. They blend well with the surface and can look very natural. They don't, however, play well with altitude and slope constraints. Individual rocks either get chopped off (fuzzy zone = 0) or fade away (fuzzy zone > 0), and neither looks very good. Sometimes it can be a challenge to achieve perfect texture/displacement alignment. Sometimes the shapes can get pretty funky.
Populations of imported rock populations are harder to set up and blend with the surface. Unless they are very high-poly, force displacement is needed to avoid smooth silhouettes. When combining several layers collisions are inevitable (unless you are also very careful with masking). But individual rocks are either placed, or not. So they work well with constraints and PF masks. Errant instances can be moved or edited out. Aligning textures isn't even a consideration. Worldspaced shading nodes can be added to each stone's internal network to unify larger patterns across populations. And they render very quickly.
Populations of the native rock object are another category. I haven't had much luck with these. In looking through the forum the consensus seems to be that this is a legacy feature that is best avoided.
QuoteIf you need the better/finer displacements of fake stones, you could restrict them to front, and use pops further back.
Good idea.
QuoteYou can use mesh displacer on imported objects, like a sphere for a rock pop that's more detailed.
Yes, maybe do this for closeup objects.