Yes i do recall the pluggable alpine concepts now. It all still sounds nice.
I think another Branching Shader should be written because say you want to isolate those effects into a power fractal for example. Then you have more play into what faked erosive cuts can be created for that extra realism. Even more so say this new shader has a lot of nifty options for different types of cuts weather depicting hard water cuts, thermal weathering, large fan deposits and even faking rivers to some degree. It is still iterated to a certain degree but can be kept limited to certain size without having to worry over the smallest details and if a user wants smaller cuts, that can be applied and layered in with larger cuts if need be.
I can see warping working best for Alpine, Power Fractal and the proposed Branch Shader. Everything else could be using the other methods. What if you could also change the aspect of the channels in the Alpine Shader as well. Wider ones and very narrow one, longer ones and tapered variants. The proposed Branching Shader ideas could also be added to a Alpine Shader update beside making the entire thing pluggable.
For the Gradient Slope, say you have rigid peaks and want to smooth off everything to soft while still being true to the slopes but other shaders can be mixed in along with that one. The idea is to create smooth deposit flows that go out into larger sedimentary basins, talus build up, aluvial fans and so on.
The problem with the Simple Shape Shader is that it does not conform to other fractal noises so there is nothing i can do with it for smoother deposit slopes. The Distance Shader i would image having the same exact issue where nothing conforms around the slopes for each fractal noise.
The Simple Shape Shader is good for a single Hoodoo but i need hundreds of these guys clustered here and there but haven't a clue how that is possible.
Besides that i am hoping i am making sense of all of this. I might have to draw more in-depth illustrations to get a clearer picture of what i mean.
