Soft strata

[René]

Soft strata, sort of.
Maybe this has been done way before, but I thought I'd post it anyway.

[Dune]

Cool. Thanks René. Let's check this out....

[WAS]

This is something I was trying to do with the terracing function. It has hard edges that mess with displacement or erosion. Definitely going to give this a peak.

[WAS]

This is pretty genius, I have to say. Works very well, and an interesting approach to it.

[Hannes]

Thanks a lot, René! I instantly had the idea to roughen it up a bit and then to erode. Might be something...

[René]

For demonstration purposes, a strong image pass was used in this scene, and displacement spike limit was set to 0.5.
The three strata layers only vary in the number of octaves. If you use identical strata layers it works too, but the "trick" will be more obvious. Actually, it's easy as one-two-three. 

[Hannes]

A quick test with added power fractal displacement and Daniils erosion.

[Dune]

The only other way to make soft strata is to divide the greys of a fractal thru a displ to scalar (or use its color directly) into altitude parts with smooth steps (each step a certain altitude plus a certain raise, next a bit higher, etc), and mix or add those again, then displace. Tedious, but soft.