Generally trying to use Houdini for anything where other programs choke on. This particular scene you mean, was just inspired by some visit to the coast.

Initially started with Lidar data from USGS from a coastal area close to San Francisco that was the highest res data I could find at that moment. Think it was 0.8m/px. I was really surprised how they split trees, land area etc. into separate point cloud layers.

Converting the point cloud to some displacement map looked like this: