I have a large plane with a procedural turbulence texture animated to look like water. I didn't want to make the plane too heavy on polygons because it's for a large lake and there's two of them in the scene. With the polygon count as it is without subpatching, the water doesn't look bad, but because the ripples are not too big, it looks more like a small pond than a large lake. I played with all the settings in the procedural such as small power and contrast, but it can't make smaller ripples when there's not enough geometry.
Making the plane subptached I get more geometry as I raise the level, but to get to a point where I like what I see I have to go to at least level 8, and that makes everything really slow, especially when loading the scene into the GPU because Octane has to compress the whole scene into the card's 4 GB of RAM (actually less when taking into account other things that are taking up space in the VRAM). So I which would be the most efficient choice of those two, between raising the subpatch level or adding much more geometry to the planes?
Thanks