That’s very interesting. It may even open up an angle to another side-effect of ‘displacing’ (be it through pixel or a vertex shader) and that’s the texture stretching it produces. A while ago I asked on Answerhub whether it was possible to get rid of the horrible stretching that occurs when displacing vertexes over anything but low amounts and the answer was ‘nope’ ;_) but after many moons of trial and error I discovered there actually is an option of creating a mask out of the displacement distance and then tri-planar mapping this. It’s very iffy to get it looking correct but when it does, it looks quite nice. The old ‘relief-mapping’ example (with those nice skyscraper node trees for the stepping) included in the UE4 startercontent also has a somewhat similar approach by just coding in a side-texture that masks the stretching to a certain extend.