So, with that disclaimer out of the way, let’s set up a tessellation material! It’s pretty straightforward: the first thing we have to do is to enable tessellation in the material properties, by setting the D3D11 Tessellation mode to either Flat Tessellation or PN Triangles. Older graphics cards without full DirectX 11 support might not even support it, so take that into account as well. The tradeoff for this is performance – the added tessellation detail comes at a rendering cost, and you should always take care to check whether a given mesh really needs tessellation or not – so don’t simply use it everywhere. This is done through the use of height maps, monochrome textures that tell the renderer which parts of the texture are elevated and which ones are not. Now, the most useful aspect of tessellation is that you can use that dynamically created geometry and offset it from the base mesh, creating not just the illusion of detail as you would normally do with normal maps, but add actual geometric detail. With tessellation enabled, those faces will be subdivided dynamically, based on the tessellation multiplier, like so: Consider this standard template cube model that comes with the engine: What tessellation does is to subdivide a 3D model’s geometry to add more detail, and it does this entirely on the GPU. I’ve been experimenting with this recently because the usual techniques involving normal maps to add surface detail to an object simply don’t hold up well in virtual reality, and my development is focused on VR. Let’s talk a little bit about tessellation in Unreal Engine 4.
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