Long Render With This

[RichTwo]

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  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.

[WAS]

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.

[WAS]

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.

[WAS]

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.

[RichTwo]

Thanks for looking into it!  I'll have a go at your revision here shortly.