I don't have time for sophisticated studies so I just did a straight visual comparison of two aligned mountains (the best I could, although not perfect), both 200 meters tall. I created one procedural terrain, duplicated it and converted it to standard terrain. I created in GC2 a normal mountain with thin flow deep erosion filter, with 2048x2048 (as in your recommendation) and applied it to both terrains. In the procedural terrain I used scale 1.0 and used bilinear interpolation. In the standard terrain I just "applied picture" and blended at 100%. I rendered both in AO, each time hiding the other one from render. This is the procedural terrain, I'll soon post the standard terrain.
My conclusions:
- I don't see any artifacts, despite the 1.0 scale
- There is a slight difference in detail between the renders but I would say the standard terrain is very good, much much better than Vue6 terrains in the same type of comparison. IMO, your statement "standard terrains are totaly inadequate as they severely smooth all the tiny details of the terrain." is a gross exageration.
Again, these are only my opinions which happen to differ from yours. I still fail to see why diverging opinions would make anyone abandon a forum, but who am I to judge?
I can provide the Vue scene file if anyone is interested in doing some further tests.
