Transferring height map / tesselation details to mesh?
polycounter lvl 11
I'm currently working with a limited game engine that does not support realtime tessellation for surfaces. This means that most of my rocks and other nature materials are looking very flat compared to what they looked like in UE4 and CryEngine. Does anyone know any technique of transferring details to the mesh? Like, having a plane or simpler rock surface and baking the tesselation to the mesh itself?
Replies
1-Your engine might not support tesselation, but you could try and see if it supports parallax oclussion maping, it might achieve a result similar to what you want.
2-In your modelling package you can usually do "baked tesselation"; I don't know how it would be done in your modelling package (if you just told us what software you use...), but in blender you can use the displacement modifier (I think it's called the same in 3dsm)
But I never tried it myself in Blender. Not sure the data transfer would cope with normals properly and you wouldn't have to bake normal maps again. Blender data transfer is not as reliable as Max projection modifier, normal theft script or Maya attribute transfer imo. But in theory it should work. For rocks at least.