How to create this advanced piece of terrain

[Millionviews]

Hello!
Looking for some tips and advice…
I am trying to recreate this:

So far I am running out of luck and I tried the following:
super dense tessellation which currently comes close at most.
See http://www.millionviews.com/v6/Mars-2015

Problem here is, I am losing a more organic and nature look and feel. Beside, Tess is super heavy on performance. I got it working with triplanar and also the problem with the triplanar setup, at angled hill slopes that do not face X or Y directly, the distortion is too heavy.

I tried modular rocks, the details looks nice but the flow and cracks as seen on real image are missing.

I tried world machine with a super dense landscape for a couple of meters. The flow and organic feel are very nice but then I am missing the real fine detail that I got from the tess. examples.

I tried to assign a world planar noisy map that displaces vertex to the bottom to be able to at random stones while maintaining the cracks between the stones.
This was a nice idea. (was)

So now what?
I am aware that this image and this type of terrain is very hard to do.
The orginal terrain is a existing heightmap and I don’t want to alter it too much. There is a certain flow and structure in all these stones which makes it almost impossible to just at some random stones with slates. It is not the same.
A hill should be feel like it is broken and cracked. Eroded by water over a million years and covered in sand.

Does anyone have some tips or ideas how to handle these kind of terrains?

regards! T

[DamirH]

Only few bits in that image are actual landscape. Really, it’s only the brown sand layer. The rest would be static meshes.

[Millionviews]

@DamirH;497105

Only few bits in that image are actual landscape. Really, it’s only the brown sand layer. The rest would be static meshes.

I see…and would you create modular chunks of hills with all the cracks and stuff as static meshes or individual stones and align them to the sand hill?

[anonymous_user_138c2332]

There are various height maps from Mars that you can combine and use as terrain in your level.

For big rocks use static meshes, you can use tessellation for smaller ones.

[Millionviews]

@Errvald;497122

There are various height maps from Mars that you can combine and use as terrain in your level.

For big rocks use static meshes, you can use tessellation for smaller ones.

Thnx, I am already doing so. (comb heightmaps) So, a combination of techniques after al. I would love to use static meshes, but the problem I am facing here is, how can I align them correct with the hill.
I would love to have some kind of a tool or workflow to align stones like puzzles / jigsaw pieces together and have some space between them (sand)