I was digging through File Sharing and thought this was interesting enough to give it a shot. A 800 X 360 test low-res render didn't seem to be overly long, but doing a full size with recommended render settings (sampling customized) or with the legacy setting results in an abysmally slow time. It took nearly an hour to render the first 25%, so I gave up.
This is where I got the project file - https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,25717.0.html (https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,25717.0.html) Thanks to WAS for sharing, it looks really great!
The only thing I see that was unusual is the internal nodes are all red. Would that make a difference? Is there any way to speed up the render? Normally for any project I do, it's less than an hour. Also here's my version of it.
Yes, this project has a lot of merge shaders, which add up to render time, coupled with the low computed normal and high lateral computation, it gets nuts. I'll take a look at this project though and see if I can shed some render time off it for ya, it is relatively old and I've seen worked on other methods for lateral stuff.
Also I think
@Dune has made some similar formations recently with fake stones that may be much quicker.
Also secondary thought (I can't view the file at the moment) this may have been based on my old default project for TGD which has ray detail multiplier at 1 under the subdiv settings. May really help too with handling small details. With rock like this and no water stuff 0.25 is fine.
So there are just too many merges, plus the secondary compute normal for any real fixing of that method. Here is something utilizing the base Computer Terrain with a small patch size. May be able to come up with a similar scene with much better render times.
27min render at current settings supplied on my Ryzen 5.
Thanks for looking into it! I'll have a go at your revision here shortly.