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Thanks! Haven't tried the discombobulator, will check it out. Yeah, adaptive subdiv eats RAM like crazy, having some smarter tool would be awesome.

Yep, that's JSplacement.

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I tweak it all the time, of course, but for this sort of pattern the quality deteriorates noticeably.

Have u tryed using texture displacment u could bake all the details in a map and then us a low poly cube to render so its not so heavy anymore specially when u just use a cube i guess u can do nice in cycles nice renders btw happy to discover u here

Hmm, do you mean simple bump mapping? It's fine for very subtle details, but there's no way to make it look good for prominent shapes (as far as I know).