for version 2.78 mini. Blender can now be used like terragen,i used a 16 bit tiff elevation file (geotiff) computed from lidar datas for recreating a real terrain near san francisco. Elevation map is included, and the 8k diffuse map is also included.
it's a new feature of version 2.78 : adaptive subdivision. when you use this, no matter which level of subdivision you use, it will be computed regarding to mesh distance from the camera. (so you can set it to 0 or any other value, i use 0 coz it flag the modifier to red so i can see directly which ones are marked "adaptive subdivision") you have to set the adaptive subdivision on to use microdosplacement.
in this scene, the terrain is just a plane of 4KM square subdivde 10 times (very few vertices)
you can find detailed information on how to use it here :
http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/45873/blender-cycles-true-displacement
This looks great. I'm interested in doing this. I can create a real-world mesh terrain from a Lidar point cloud, but I don't know where to find the satellite imagery to use for the diffuse map. Where did you download this image?
i use a software called global-mapper to buld the diffuse map from wms tiles. you can do the same thing with any good GIS software, a free one is Qgis. http://www.bluemarblegeo.com/products/global-mapper-download.php https://www.qgis.org/fr/site/forusers/download.html
Interesting. Some fairly nasty discontinuities. Also what's with the SubSurf set to zero?