Here's a puzzle for you. These are 3 low res clips together with the relevant screen captures from a scene where a water shader is being used as a child layer of a surface layer.
The first one show the original set up with the water shader enabled and connected.
The second is with the shader disabled, and the third with the shader disconnected.
As you can see there is no difference when the water layer is just disabled (it actually renders in nearly half the time!)
The shader has to be disconnected for it not to show.
Is this a bug?
Looks like all the displacement on the water shader is all that is being disabled and the reflectivity isn't. I knew that the water(and reflective)shader needs unplugging to actually disable them but I didn't know that the displacement of the water would actually be disabled when the node was. Weird. I'm sure I've seen Matt post about this before so it's known about, whatever is actually happening.
I'm pretty sure this is a known issue which should be fixed in the upcoming 2.4 release.
- Oshyan
Thanks Oshyan.