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Game Developer tinybugbot, who previously shared a tip on crafting mechanical surface textures, has now offered a handy technique for visualizing displacement effects directly in the viewport with Houdini.
You're aiming to work with 2D volumes so that you can extract 3D data, process it into a usable height map for displacement, and apply it to an object for surface detail. Since this isn't true geometry deformation but rather modifying a surface based on height map data, a low-poly model is sufficient.
The artist is using Houdini 20.5's new Copernicus, a 2D and 3D GPU image processing framework with nodes that provide real-time image manipulation within a 3D space. If you missed it, we highly recommend checking out the Houdini HIVE presentations from industry experts, along with Stormz's introductory videos on Copernicus:
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100% procedural material made in SD. The pack contains Strangler Fig Graph (sbs and sbsar), texture maps (Albedo, Normal, Roughness, AO, Height, Metal).