The "distance to object below" node is indeed Infinite only. There are more nodes avaiable in Infinite than in Esprit. For procedural terrains, there is a great flash tut you can buy at cornucopia3d.com, for 20$. I agree, it isn't cheap. The fnction editor is powerful, and can be intimidating at first, but it really is the only place to create good materials and terrains. As suggested by dburdick, just load a material in a Vue scene, and check how this material was created in the function editor. Then change some parameters, and check how the material is affected by what you changed.