I only see tessellation example on rocky things. what about human model? did anyone tessellated realistic human character? Is there a pros and cons to do that? I have to ask because I don’t know if I should model my realistic character in high poly 30-50k tris or just do 10k tris then tessellated.
30-50k is not very high for this generation of game engines. Of course, if you’re having thousands of such characters on screen at the same time, it could be a problem, but if this is a main character, 30-50k is actually a little on the low side, many current games have 80k+ polys for main characters. I would go for the higher polycount.
I’ve tested the PN-triangle tesselation for characters. It give you much rounder and softer silhouette for the ears and small things like on the nose. But in general i don’t see the point of using it for games…
If you just going to get nice character screens then i guess it should be fine to go all out. It just depends on what you want.
I would probably spend 50-80k triangles on the character, making sure the head has its own material, and then apply some tessellation to the head for that extra bit of detail.
Thank you for answers. I will go with like 80k as suggested then try tesselate to see if It get better.
What about 50 corrective morph on 80k model + 20 face morph? would that slow the game down much?
I would still like to hear about the pros and cons to using tessellation for a character model.
I only see benefit of tessellation for a film character where you can afford the low performance it will produce to the scene, but not sure if a game will get that much benefit. Lets use an example, Rise of the Tomb Raider. During game play the character is mostly with its back to the viewer, so tessellation only makes sense if applied to the clothing, but as the character is moving constantly it is hard for you to realize details with lots of movement, which is different for scenario where even with your character moving, the scenario will still move less relative to the character.
If you want to use tessellation I would disable it totally during any animation and get it back when animation stops, unless tessellation plays an specific role here. This is useful, because with character not running there is always a chance the player is staring at the character (whatever he is doing).
A good normal map baking is preferred for details and also if you can afford having large texture sizes for your title. Tessellation would be required if you need that surface bump that you don’t have in the original model mesh.