"Condition before displacement" switch map

[Schloerby]

I've played a lot with the VRay demo and one thing that might be extremely useful to build shaders would be to preserve the initial face normal information beyond the micropoly displacement process. This could for example be an additional map type, acting as a "container" - just like the output map in MAX.

Example: I'm using a falloff map to simulate roughness of a cloth body. My wish was that this effect should follow the initial curvature of the body, and not consider the normals of each surface indent that is being generated after displacement. So once I put the falloff map into the desired "container", its output would just be "extruded" along with the displacement, and not influenced thereby anymore. Do I make sense or shall I post some example images?

Cheers!
Schlörby

[trixian]

Material depth calculations

Would be very useful to have a feature like that.
A friend of mine writes renderman shaders, and with the latest build of renderman, he is now able to use the SSS (or other features) and make it ignore bumpmaps and\or displacement maps for computation. This feature is as far as i know available as a global setting in brazil, to a certain extent, and not only lets you speed things up when using gi,sss and the likes, but also lets you acheive looks that otherwise would be difficult to make.
Snow would be a good example. Say you use displacement to make some good, deep, chunky snow, with smooth bumps as well as clear "breaks" like holes where a boot has made a deep foot print, og an edge where the side has broken off. This is a perfect situation to calculate SSS for the snow only using the underlying geometry's surface and ignore any displacement and bump one has aplied.
Suddenly I feel like I have drifted off topic
Anyway...the ability to controll which parameters affecting a given "advanced" raytracing feature in the material would be nice