A thing of the past?
Why exaclty? Having an engine subdivide a mesh and apply a custom smoothing algorhytm is essentially the way to double up topology on the fly…
If you have ever played Thief Gold for instance, the mod released by one of the studio did just this. Make a 20 year old game look awsome 10 years down the line. Simply by adding geometry at a time when computers were actually able to handle it.
I’ll grant you the fact that adding geometry past a certainty point becomes useless, with a diminishing ROI, but I I don’t really see how this is something that won’t be used essentially forever.
What’s more, take into account systems like Snow Trails that rely on it entirely. What is this new “thing” that’s going to blast our projects out of the water and make them obsolete???
If there is a ‘better’ way, I’m all for it. I just don’t see a better way short of painting meshes onto the terrain to create tessellation on them… which actually is possible via the grass tool, but you would be doubling or tripling the base geometry for it…