A Woodland Meeting

[Dune]

You'll just have to use fake stones. A bit more cumbersome, I admit. Or crop the stones area and fit them in later in PS.

[cyphyr]

Its rather annoying 
I keep flipping back and forth between RTO on and off.
RTO (Ray trace objects) on and the forest and grasses look fantastic but the Rock Object wont displace.
RTO off and the forest looks cr@p and the Rock Object looks great.
The shadow casting from the Rock Object (RTO off) is odd and wont comp well with the trees and grasses (RTO on).

Round and round I go. I tried Dunes suggestion (thank you) of using a Fake stone shader, it kinda works but makes a different "style" of stone which if its in the wrong place (it will be) needs to be "transformed" to the right location. This causes a shear in the stones displacement.

Its looking like my best chance is to go back to where I started and make a physical model of a stone, maybe in ZBrush or similar.
Still its rendering away at the moment (RTO on) and I'll see where I go from here later this evening.

Richard

[Tangled-Universe]

Its rather annoying 
I keep flipping back and forth between RTO on and off.
RTO (Ray trace objects) on and the forest and grasses look fantastic but the Rock Object wont displace.
RTO off and the forest looks cr@p and the Rock Object looks great.
The shadow casting from the Rock Object (RTO off) is odd and wont comp well with the trees and grasses (RTO on).

Round and round I go. I tried Dunes suggestion (thank you) of using a Fake stone shader, it kinda works but makes a different "style" of stone which if its in the wrong place (it will be) needs to be "transformed" to the right location. This causes a shear in the stones displacement.

Its looking like my best chance is to go back to where I started and make a physical model of a stone, maybe in ZBrush or similar.
Still its rendering away at the moment (RTO on) and I'll see where I go from here later this evening.

Richard

Did you try to translate the fake stones AND its displacement function? This way they should stay aligned when using the same translation setting.
Can you show what's odd about the shadows when you don't use RTO for the rock, but RTO for the trees and grasses?
How does that look when you use non-adaptive AA?

[cyphyr]

Here is a quicky of the rock shadow issue. I guess this will be the same or similar issue as I came across here.
The shadow is only correct in the last image. In the first two images the rock is heavily displaced but the shadow is from the un-displaced geometry.
I'm worried that with an much larger image the shadow fail will show up badly, since the shadow will be cast mostly over vegetation.
cheers
Richard

[Tangled-Universe]

Thanks Richard. It's something totally different than I had in mind. So I'm afraid I can't help you since I also think it is that particular bug you mentioned.

Hope you can find a way to make fake stones work for you in this image, because it is a really good render!