» Fri Jun 03, 2011 10:11 am
Tesselation makes sense in Hawks, less in Crysis 2 if you already have high-res textures. People are just monkeys jumping on every hype and media-stuff. The best way to stay clean is not to watch tv...?hhh youtube.
I'm pretty sure the only thing Tessellation does to textures is apply displacement maps. What this means is the texture has extra unseen info built into it. This info tells the GPU where and how to displace the Geometry of the level where it has a specific texture. So say the artist has painted a large pebble in a gravel-like texture. Using DX 11's Tessellation feature, you can tell the pebble in the texture to "pop up .5cm, and break your triangle into 20 different ones" (This makes it so the pebble has enough triangles to look like a pebble, and not a random large triangle jutting out of the ground) This feature can be toggled off and on at will, and has some other very nice benefits as well:
-Since a decal is a small texture that an be applied anywhere, you can give displacement maps to them. For example, if you have a bullet hole, you can tell the game that any triangle within the bullet hole gets displaced by 1cm inwards.
-Because you are altering the actual geometry of a level, the engine treats it as such, so all of your displaced textures will be able to affect the collisions of rigid bodies, and will be fully shaded and have high-res shadows.
Crysis 1 has something similar to this, but it was a lot less effective. It was called Parallax Occlusion mapping. It was designed to achieve the same thing as displacement mapping, but only by altering the placements of pixels on your screen, and not the geometry of the level. This made it look good up close, but you got some weird as hell rendering bugs when you approached something with Parallax Occlusion from the side. The texture would warp and twist the closer you got to it, and it did not look pretty.
Crysis 2 would be really effective if they used tessellation for the reason you stated. Because Crysis 2 DOES have high-res textures, it gives developers much more freedom to displace the small details drawn in the texture. There's not much you can do with a white stone wall, but as soon as you start adding cracks, nicks, and little details, you can really make your surfaces come to life with Tessellation.