During the intro to a game I (perodically) work on, the player starts on a pirate ship. Realistic water doesn’t fit the style, and scroling textures on a big plane looked pretty boring. To make things a bit angrier I needed intense waves, and I needed those waved to actually affect the world. Waves To keep it simple, I just did procedural heightmap; i.e. set the vertical coorinate to be a function of the horizontal position and time. ...
I am not a good artist. One of the reason 3D is a bit more attractive to me is that I can usually build something rather than draw it or sculpt it. Digital art gives you an “undo” button, but being able to undo or redo things out of order makes it even easier to experiment. Most of the terrain tools out there have a destructive workflow. Using various brushes, you write directly to a heightmap. Including the concept of “layers” can help here, but I want something closer to modeling. ...
Triplanar mapping is already expensive, and multiplying that by the samples for paralax occlusion mapping is probably a bad idea. It was fun to implement this anyway, even if I don’t use it in a game. In my current WFC prototypes, I’m re-using models and rotating them. At some point I’ll need to handle also transforming the UVs based on the rotation of the tiles’ models, but for now triplanar mapping is a quick way to get an idea of how things might look. ...