Hi Dr. Why did you use a carpet map for displacement and not a greyscaled version of the grass texture?

@BbB : I don't know why, but with carpet map it looks much better.

did u guys see www.crazybump.com ? this piece of software will drop ur jaws down heheh

I made one grass test too. It needs at least one more sub-div level, but I'm on a very old machine at the moment.

@suvakas:
It looks at the same time fluffy and poinky. I don't know weather I would lay down or stay well clear of it!

Yeah, the strands in the foreground are quite sharp. I think the higher subdiv would make it look a bit better.

Perhaps try with less displacement. And also adding darker and lighter spots on your displacement maps to vary the length of the grass. I don't think it necessarily needs more subdivision.

I'm still towards more subdivs.
More tris = thinner strands = softer look...I think.

Dunno. What about slightly less displacement.
The Doc's grass looks like it was freshly mown...

Yes, shorter would be nicer, but I wanted to test more weed type of look - longer grass.

In that case you might really be better off with instanced meshes. Especially if you're going to cover such a large terrain. Then again, it's hard to bend meshes to a terrain like this one.

But as a displacement test, of course, I find it really interesting. Maybe it's just the case that realism really depends on the map you're using...

maybe we should announce "perfect grass field competition"? such threads are so productive and often result as great tutorials for newbies.
personally i would go for many instanced and different alpha mapped planes as much more memorywise and more "photo-like"

Wanted to see if displacement worked with blended material. It does !
The current preview scene is not really appropriate with that kind of material, so I replaced the sphere with a simple curved plane (the circle around the logo is where the plane intersects with the sphere).

To create the displacement map, I followed that tutorial : it's a height map based on real geometry, made in blender. It takes slightly more time than creating a map from a photography, but it's much more accurate. Though in that case, a 16bit images wouldn't hurt.

Regarding the grass, I second BbB, I don't think you can create nice-looking long grass with displacement, the leaves are too "straight". It's ok for a short grass, you know, where you play golf.

Fence looks great - you modeled the fence section and then rendered a heightmap? That's something i hadn't thought of before..

I'm posting that one to show an issue encountered with 8-bit image.
Here I think a 16-bit image would solve the problem.