Microdisplacement patches will now stitch together (ie. the workaround of using smooth shading should no longer be needed). Yes, Mai is back for good.
https://developer.blender.org/rB697fd86506fd0caaa41e2fbf0463b5229d09251e
Based on https://developer.blender.org/D3692
What this also means is the end of cracking issues from discontinuities in the displacement map and no cracking where one material begins and another one ends.
Oh. My.
I can die in peace.
Now I only need a rework for particle system and I can re-do my misty meadow.
It´s in the works. Have you seen the node based particles branch videos by Jaque Lucke?
Oh great ! Glad to see her back. She appeared out of the blue and made microdisplacement, I wonder what we can expect now. :]
could you explain what a microdisplacement patch is? 
I wonder will micro displacement be taken out of the âexperimentalâ phase? Currently the adaptive subsurf feature is still hidden unless you are in experimental mode.
Still a lot on the to do list: https://developer.blender.org/T53901
But glad to see that this is getting some love again. 
Yes, but how long untill I get it on the daily builds?
Doing an experiment with the White Noise node, I donât know if many realize just how powerful this seemingly simple node can be for shader building (as I have found it can have huge implications for dispersion setups).
The two dispersion shaders use just a single shading node and as a result is not only fast to render, but it also looks identical in both normal Path Tracing and Branched Path Tracing. It even works in Eevee (though the look is a little different).
can you share a screenshot of the nodes?
I did think the white noise node might be suitable for glass dispersion.
I used the brick texture in the past to achieve a similar effect in the thread below, but thought the white noise might work better (havenât got round to downloading a build to test it yet though).
The difference is that the white noise node is specifically designed as a sort of ârandom number generatorâ with its infinitely small resolution and its true 3D and even 4D nature. That is how Omar sees it anyway.
Yep - just testing it now, seems to works really well. All I did was swap it out for the brick texture in my node setup above and it gives a reasonable result straight away.
Could you do a speed test? does the RNG white noise work faster than the brick hack?
It would be more useful if it also had a color output, and the fac output differed from any of the components. It is useful that it is 4D capable, although I havenât come up with a test for this yet. Not much time to play, doing some stuff in 2.80.
The vector nodes seem very promising though. Already had tons of fun using math.fraction and vector.fraction. Meaning we donât have to use complex special modulo tricks or offsets. Offsets cannot be used if you want to play around the origo of a generator (musgrave). This one does all that stuff - in a single node, absolutely beautiful - love it to death!
Anyone had any luck messing around with project and reflect vector math? I only saw one video so far, and it didnât touch on these possibly fun ones. I have an idea what reflect might do, which makes me wonder why we donât have a refract as well (with IOR setting showing up). But havenât had time to play.
Just tested - itâs marginally faster (a little under 1%).
Brick = 29.33
White Noise = 29.11
The brick texture hack is already faster than the traditional add shader method. I think I was getting speedups of 25% or more using the brick method - plus IMO the result looks better too as you are assigning IORs across the entire colour spectrum, not just RGB.
White noise has some interesting effects on volume shaders. You can easily implement volumetric scatter anisotropic dispersion.
Put white noise through a multicoloured colour ramp into the colour slot, then the white noise into the anisotropy slot. You get some nice colour grading effects depending on where the lightsource is relative to the viewer.
And⌠a picture?
Iâm not seeing anything new. âWhite noiseâ ('ish) could be done before using noise, vModuloContinuous, contrast nodes etc. White noise just makes it way more efficient to setup. Except Iâd like to see 3D or 4D outputs.
Weâve been doing âtexture blurringâ like that for a long time. Except it has nothing to do with blurring, it just screws up the coordinates - no values are interpolated/mixed. Only in a few cases can it âlookâ like blurring, but usually it will fall flat on its face.
