Hello everybody! I have now created a number of CineRender surfaces by using only different shaders and layers. I am starting to find it inspiring and fun in many ways. The benefit of not using images is, beside much less heavy files and faster rendering, that you get rid of the ugly tile repetition effect, and get naturalistic, endlessly varied surfaces like marble.
However, I am a bit disappointed to discover that there is still a disturbing repetition effect in the photo rendered image when I use several of the same object, balusters of a stair in this example. The funny thing is that the balusters are not 100% identical, but the pattern changes only slightly from piece to piece, each baluster is light in the bottom and patterned in the upper half. This looks unnatural and makes the enervating work to modify each and every baluster manually in Photoshop necessary again, which I have really hoped to be able to skip by using a generic CineRender surface.