/3/ - 3DCG

Got it half figured out. Looks like I was wrong about one little detail as well. For some unknown reason, "render as" particles show up as all being the same object ONLY while true displacement is being calculated. They show up as unique objects/particles during the rest of the render (so the particle info node works for the material's shader output, but not its displacement output). Is it a bug 2.80? Just a limitation with blender in general? I don't know, but its pretty easy to work around anyways. I just used a collection of object that all shared the same mesh, but were located in different spots in world space. This allowed the true displacement's noise pattern to be driven by the Geometry node's position output instead of the particle node's temporarily none functioning location output.

A true displacement variance of a dozen different option, and a perfectly unique variance in the normals input of the shader seems to give roughly the result I was looking for (hue and saturation were also randomized slightly). Combining that with some randomness in particle location/rotation/scale really made them all feel quite unique... And it all fit in a less ram then 4k .png

Sadly, this render is already outdated. I made it this morning, but I've already figured out a much simpler solution for varying the bricks inset. Now that the bricks are a handful of distinct objects the Object Info node's random output can be used instead. Plugging it into a vector displacement node allows it to drive a tiny variation in the brick's location during true displacement.

>excuse the bricks sticking out of the ground... that's the collection that the brick particles are copying. Apparently, they need to be visible during render, but I forgot to move them off screen since they don't need to be visible in the viewport.

Whelp, back to trying to figure out how to bend the bricks using true displacement only. It'd be nice to use the same mesh for pillars/archways with different radius's.