Tessellation after displacement

Development Rendering
1

It appears that tessellation happens after displacement. Is this correct? That’s not a very good setup if so, how is tessellation even remotely useful?

Is there any way to reverse this process so the shaders tessellate THEN displace? Otherwise all it does is smooth out the mesh rather than allow you to add extra detail. A combination of PN tesselation and higher detail displacement would be amazing but the result I’m getting right now could be so much better:

This is a PN smoothed mesh of quite a low detail sphere. The detail in this heightmap is sufficient to come through with that level of tessellation, if only it did.

I guess I could solve this using higher LOD meshes but the amount of popping is going to be jarring too.

2

Not quite.

To be fair, PN triangles are suitable more for smoothing out silhouettes, rather than adding detail to the surface.

3

PN gives rather lovely results - that’s what I’m using it for, smoothing the tessellated mesh.

Here’s a non-PN example of what I mean. I’ve frac’ed the heightmap and plugged it into the diffuse so you can see where you should see detail:

The only deformation taking place is on vertices that exist in the original, pre-tessellation mesh. This should definitely not be simply forming flat faces, otherwise what is the point of it?

Here’s my settings:

4

Update: oh ho, I’m a ******. It would help if I was plugged into World Displacement and not World Position Offset. :smiley: