Normally a wall would just have 6 faces (a front face, back face, top/bottom and side faces). But I looked at the walls in the Starter Content Architectural folder, and they are subdivided multiple times. I don’t mean smoothed, but just the faces have been subdivided. What is the purpose of this? Does it help with UVing or for texturing? Vertex painting perhaps?
Definitely useful if you want to work some kind of vertex painting blended material, also, very important if you intend to use tessellation.
For tessellation no, since you can adjust the level of subdivision within the material. So it’s only needed for vertex painting
Oh, interesting. Well does the model need a lot of verts in order to paint correctly? Such as Zbrush needing a lot of polys to get sufficient detail? With the wall in that screenshot (which was taken from the Starter Content), would that be enough verts to paint something of nice detail, or would it need to be subdivided heavily?
I know this is an old thread, but it answered the same question I had.
I disagree with the answer. Controlling where your initial subdivisions are is important for tessellation as well.
say you wish to create a wall that can either have lines on the bricks or be flat. Tessellation won’t help. You need 2 vertex points very close to each other to displace the brick with tessellation. You also need it to match a height map.
in this case, the geometry would be drastically different then just adding a tessellation multiplier to the object.
you can achieve better performance leaveing the multiplier at 0 and having the mesh be exactly how it needs to be to displace.
Ofc, you could also really displace it and create LODs, but that’s a different story.
Additionally, vertex painting can be kind of important to break up tiling / repetitiveness. That’s also an important consideration to make that is purely project dependent.